The flow of birds over the observation deck continues, but it’s getting late. I make my farewell, take the elevator back down the building and wander uphill to my apartment. Though it’s long past midnight, I’m wide awake. Part of what high-rise buildings are designed to do is change the way we see. To bring us different views of the world, views intimately linked with prospect and power – to make the invisible visible. The birds I saw were mostly unidentifiable streaks of light, like thin retinal scratches or splashes of luminous paint on a dark ground. As I look up from street level, the blank sky above seems a very different place, deep and coursing with life.
Two days later, I decide to walk in Central Park, and find it full of newer migrants that arrived here at night and stayed to rest and feed. A black-and-white warbler tacking along a slanted tree trunk deep in the Ramble, a yellow-rumped warbler sallying forth into the bright spring air to grab flies, a black-throated blue warbler so neat and spry he looks like a folded pocket handkerchief. These songbirds are familiar creatures with familiar meanings. It’s hard to reconcile them with the remote lights I witnessed in the sky.
Living in a high-rise building bars you from certain ways of interacting with the natural world. You can’t put out feeders to watch robins and chickadees in your garden. But you are set in another part of their habitual world, a nocturne of ice crystals and cloud and wind and darkness. High-rise buildings, symbols of mastery over nature, can work as bridges towards a more complete understanding of the natural world – stitching the sky to the ground, nature to the city. For days afterwards, my dreams are full of songbirds, the familiar ones from woods and backyards, but also points of moving light, little astronauts, travellers using the stars to navigate, having fallen to Earth for a little while before picking themselves up and moving on.
The Human Flock
Under heavy rain the lakes have turned to phosphorescent steel. Pygmy cormorants hunch on dead trees. Twelve of us stand on the shore. Some have set out spotting scopes on tripods on the grass, others carry binoculars. Silently we stand in wait for the Hungarian dusk. As the sun slips behind the expanse of water the air grows colder. We strain our ears until – there it is – we hear a faint noise like baying hounds or discordant bugles, at first hardly discernible through the wind rattling the reeds before it grows into an unearthly clamour. ‘Here they come!’ someone whispers. Overhead, a long, wavering chevron of beating wings is inked across the darkening sky. Behind it flow others, and there are others behind them, all passing overhead in ever-increasing waves, filling the air with a barrage of noise and beauty.
The birds above us are long-necked, graceful Eurasian cranes. Every autumn more than a hundred thousand of them stop off on their southward migration from Russia and Northern Europe to spend a few weeks in the Hortobágy region of north-eastern Hungary, feeding on maize left in the fields after harvest. Every night they fly to roost in huge numbers in the safety of shallow fish-farm lakes, attracting wildlife tourists who come here to witness the spectacle of their evening flights. Similarly impressive congregations can be seen in other places. In Nebraska, more than half a million sandhill cranes fatten up in cornfields before continuing their spring migration; in Quebec, watchers are awed by blizzards of snow geese blotting out the sky as they rise from the Saint-François River. In Britain, clouds of wintering starlings flying to their roosts draw crowds of all ages.
Standing close to vast masses of birds affects everyone differently: some people laugh, some cry, others shake their heads or utter profanities. Language fails in the face of immense flocks of beating wings. But our brains are built to wrest familiar meaning from the confusions of the world, and watching the cranes at dusk I see them first turn into strings of musical notation, then mathematical patterns. The snaking lines synchronise so that each bird raises its wings a fraction before the one behind it, each moving flock resolving itself into a filmstrip showing a single bird stretched through time. It is an astonishing illusion that makes me blink in surprise. But then, part of the allure of flocking birds is their ability to create bewildering optical effects. I remember my amazement as a child watching thousands of wading birds, knots, flying against a cool grey sky, vanish and reappear in an instant as the birds turned their counter-shaded bodies in the air. Perhaps the best-known example is the hosts of European starlings that assemble in the sky before they roost. We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun. It captures their almost celestial strangeness. Standing on the Suffolk coast a few years ago, I saw a far-flung mist of starlings turn in a split second into an ominous sphere like a dark planet hanging over the marshes. Everyone around me gasped audibly before it exploded in a maelstrom of wings.
Though the rapid dynamism of flocking birds is a large part of their beauty, news sites and magazines often publish still photographs of murmurations that look like other things: sharks, mushrooms, dinosaurs. In 2015, an image of one flock over New York City shifting into the shape of Vladimir Putin’s face went viral, though it may have been fake. It’s not difficult, when presented with such a strange phenomenon, to believe in signs and wonders. The changing shape of starling flocks comes from each bird copying the motions of the six or seven others around it with extreme rapidity; their reaction time is less than a tenth of a second. Turns can propagate through a cloud of birds at speeds approaching ninety miles per hour, making murmurations look from a distance like a single pulsing, living organism. In a 1799 notebook entry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of a murmuration that shaped itself into various forms and moved ‘like a body unindued with voluntary power’. Sometimes they seem uncannily like an alien, groping entity, living sand or smoke moving through a suite of topological changes. Murmurations are thrilling, but they can also provoke an emotion akin to fear.
And fear is in large part why many of these flocks exist. Cranes, for example, roost in shallow water because it is safer than sleeping on the ground; and the sheer profusion of beating wings makes it hard for predators to focus on any single starling in a murmuration. No starling wants to be on the edge of the flock, or among the first to land. Anne Goodenough, who runs the Royal Society of Biology and University of Gloucestershire international starling survey, speculates that murmurations may act as signposts to invite other starlings to join a specific roost and increase its size – in cold weather, large roosts keep birds warm. But in the air, fear is the factor shaping the flocks, pressing and contorting them as they fly. A dark, shivering wave running through a mass of starlings is often a response to a raptor diving into the flock in search of a meal.
It is nearly dark now at the Hortobágy fishponds, and my ears ring with the cacophony of calling cranes. There is boiling confusion over the lake as flocks come from all directions to join the mass on the water that now looks like stippled, particulate fog. White-fronted geese are pouring in, too, tumbling and sideslipping from the sky through swathes of other wings. Suddenly it is almost too much to bear. I feel uncomfortably disoriented. Big flocks of birds can do this. Birders have described the experience of watching flocks of rooks at nightfall as so confusing and noisy that it produces in the viewer something close to motion sickness.
In search of something solid, I peer through a spotting scope focused on the far side of the lake. In the circle of the viewfinder, the confusion resolves into individual birds. It’s so dark that their colour has leached away. I am watching stately groups of cranes in greyscale, landing, drinking, shaking their loose feathers, greeting one another and getting on with the business of finding a place to sleep. The switch in recognition is eerie: I go from seeing rushing patterns in the sky to the realisation that they are made of thousands of beating hearts and eyes and fragile frames of feather and bone. I watch the cranes scratching their beaks with their toes and think of how the starling flocks that pour into reed beds like grain turn all of a sudden into birds perching on bowed stems, bright-eyed, their feathers spangled with white spots that glow like small stars. I marvel at how con
fusion can be resolved by focusing on the things from which it is made. The magic of the flocks is this simple switch between geometry and family.
As I stand there watching the cranes, my mind turns to human matters. The village we’d stayed in the previous night had felt so much like my home in the fens. It had the same damp, underwater air, chickens roaming around backyards, poplars, piles of winter firewood. Before I came here I’d asked a few British friends who’d spent time in Hungary what it was like, and several said that the strangest thing about it was how much it felt like home. It’s painful to recall that now. It has been nagging away at me all the time I’ve been here, the razor-wire fence the government has erected more than a hundred miles south of here to stop Syrian refugees walking across the border from Serbia; the thought of crowds moving slowly north-east as the cranes move southwest. Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety. I love the flock not simply for its biological exuberance, but for the way it has prompted me to pick similarity out of strangeness, for the way its chaos was transformed, on reflection, to individuals and small family groups wanting the simplest things: freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep.
The Student’s Tale
There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket. They’re set in a line that speaks of concern, not for yourself, but for the woman who is paying the fare. I wave through the window and you turn and see me and smile hello.
This is a borrowed house that we’re talking in. It’s not my home.
We sit at the table and I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t know anything about you.
It is hard to ask questions.
You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story. I don’t want to ask you questions, because I think of all the questions you must have been asked before. But you want me to ask you questions, and so I begin with: when did you get here? And you write, in careful Persian numerals, 12, 2016. December. And I ask more questions, and you answer them, and when the English words won’t come, you translate using your phone, and this takes some time, and the sun slaps its flat gold light upon the table and the bowl of grapes and the teapot, all these quiet domestic things, as I wait to know what you might mean. Here are the words you look up while we talk: Apostate. Bigoted. Depraved. Hide.
You are a student of epidemiology. Epidemiologists study the mode of transmission of disease, the way it runs through populations from person to person. You tell me that back in your country you used to meet with your friends in your restaurant at night so you could talk of Christianity and read the Bible. There were Christian signs in your restaurant. You knew that you might be arrested for doing this. Secrecy is paramount, but faith is also faith.
This is what happens when you are denounced as an apostate. The authorities speak of you as if you were one of the agents of disease that you have studied. At prayers one Friday they denounce you, by name, in five regions, two cities and three villages. They said that a woman at your university had depraved you, by which they meant she had encouraged you to become a Christian. They said that you had changed your religion. And that now you possess this faith, you spread it to other men.
They see your belief as a contagious disease. They want to isolate it, contain it, and like all such malevolent metaphors that equate morality with health, the cure is always extinguishment. You know what happens to apostates, to those who have changed their religion, in your country. Even I know what happens. I am holding my breath just thinking of it.
When the intelligence services came looking for you at your grandmother’s home she called you and told you that these men were your friends even though they spoke the wrong language for the region and they were wearing distinctive clothes that made it obvious, really, who they were, and why they were there, but she was old and you couldn’t blame her for expecting friendship when what was offered was its scorched obverse. Your uncle knew better. He told you to flee. Your life is in danger, he said. Truth. So you fled. You left everything.
You drove from city to city and, in a city more distant, met two friends of your uncle. They told you they could take you to Europe with others by car. And once you were there, you wondered where you should go. Your uncle said, The UK is good, and he offered to pay the smuggling agents to get you here. The car unloaded you all in an unkempt garden and you had to hide there until the middle of the night when the truck came, and you got in.
Days in the darkness inside a lorry on its way north. A freezer truck. How many people were in there with you? I ask. And you laugh, and say, Ten? I don’t know. It was dark! And I laugh too, a little ashamed, and wonder why I want to press you for these little details. None of us want to know what this is like. We don’t want to know how it feels to not eat or drink or sleep for five days and nights, to be sustained in terror and darkness merely through the hope that there is light the other side. None of us wants to know what it feels like to be threatened with a knife, as you were threatened. To be held at gunpoint by people you have paid to bring you to safety.
You say, It was the worst feeling. Then you say it again. The worst feeling.
Several times, you tell me, I see my death.
Then you say it again. I see my death.
The hardest things, I realise, you are saying them all twice.
And what I am thinking, as you say sorry into the silence while you wait to be able to once again speak, is this. I think of how scientists have only just found out how our brains make memories. They used to think that we record a short-term memory, then archive it later, move it to a different part of the brain to store it long term. But now they’ve discovered that the brain always records two tracks at once. That it is always taping two stories in parallel. Short-term memories, long-term memories, two tracks of running recollection, memory doubled. Always doubled.
Which makes everything that ever happens to us happen twice.
Which makes us always beings split in two.
You are an epidemiologist. You are a refugee.
You were one of the best epidemiology students in the whole country.
You are also an asylum seeker who has seen detention-centre inmates cut themselves with razors, lash out in violence, numb themselves with Spice.
The government wants to send you back to the European country where you first arrived, but that would be dangerous because of people there who know who you are, who have threatened you, who have contacts with the authorities back home. So now you are in a hostel, with four hundred others. You have to sign in once in the morning and once again at night. You are a student, a brother, a son, who manages to speak to your family back home through Telegram, through WhatsApp, and you are also a man who asks the receptionist for help when violence or sickness breaks out in the hostel and watches the receptionist shrug dismissively and no help comes. All the things you see between refugees, you tell me, are harmful for brain, for mind, for spirit. You say, of the hostel, in the quietest, gentlest voice, that there, nothing is good, really. Nothing is good. It is a very nasty place. You tell me, twice, that some people have not even any clothes.
In December you’d called the police from
the frozen dark inside the lorry. The police opened the doors and took you to a cell, questioned you, detained you for seventy-two hours. And when you requested asylum they moved you to an immigration detention centre. You were there for eighty days. I have heard a lot about the conditions there, this place that is known as a hellhole. So it is a mark of your kindly reticence that all you can say about it is, The situation in detention was very bad.
You are a refugee who sings in a talent competition in a detention centre where people are held indefinitely and you are also a man sitting at a sunny dining table laughing out loud at your mistake when you realise that you said your father is literature when what you meant to say was your father is illiterate. You are a man who can laugh at the ridiculousness of mistranslation, and you are also a man who has left a life behind, your father, your little brother, your ailing family members, and every corner of home, and that loss pours from you, silent through the laughter, like a cold current of air that sinks to the floor and fills the room beneath everything light that is spoken here.
Vesper Flights Page 5