Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  6

  Petra

  I

  T WAS 6.30 A.M. WHEN I woke up. Nisha would have just had a shower and gone out into the garden with long, damp hair, picking oranges and collecting fresh eggs. After bringing in the eggs, she would fry or boil them. When we had courgette flowers or wild greens, she would scramble the eggs over them and add lots of lemon and pepper. This was Aliki’s favourite.

  On this morning, Nisha was not outside. A silvery mist rested over the leaves, as if the garden had exhaled. The lira on the ground now glimmered in the sun.

  In the kitchen, Aliki was sitting at the table, still in her pyjamas, swinging her legs and playing a game on her iPad. Her loose hair fell about her face and shoulders. By this time, it was usually in a neat ponytail and she should have been wearing her school uniform and finishing off her orange juice.

  ‘Where is Nisha?’ I said.

  Aliki looked up from the screen and shrugged.

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  She tutted, no. I saw a stroke of uncertainty in her eyes. I thought she would speak but she slouched and sank further down into her seat.

  I went into Nisha’s room and found that she wasn’t there. In fact, her bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in.

  Returning to Aliki, and with as much cheer as I could muster, I said, ‘Why don’t you go and get changed and I’ll make breakfast? Then I’ll take you to school.’

  She got up, reluctantly, but did as I’d suggested. In the meantime, I called Nisha’s mobile a few times, but it went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Nisha,’ I said. ‘Where are you? Call me back.’

  I began to boil the eggs and make toast, opening all the cupboards to find where Nisha kept the fig jam. I was becoming increasingly irritated – fear hadn’t gripped me yet.

  It was Aliki who had the deeper instincts that I lacked. After I had peeled the eggs and laid the table, Aliki still hadn’t come back to the kitchen so I went to her room and found her in front of the mirror, crying. She’d put on her uniform, but she’d been unable to tie up her hair. The elastic band was stuck in a knot of curls.

  I told her to sit on the bed and I perched beside her and gently untangled the band. Then, with a wide hair-brush, I tried to bring all that hair together into a high ponytail, like Nisha did. But the curls were wild and unruly and tried to escape – as I brought one side up, the other side fell out of my grip and tumbled back down to her shoulder.

  I could feel her shifting, uncomfortable and impatient.

  ‘I’ll tell you what!’ I said. ‘Forget the ponytail. Let’s do something different.’

  So, I plaited her hair and she pulled the thick black braid over her right shoulder and stood to look at herself in the mirror. Her patio doors were open and the room was full of sunlight and music from the birds. Even the mist came in, like a lost spirit.

  Such a crisp autumn day, and it should have been a happy morning, like every other. But what I saw in Aliki’s eyes as she stared at her reflection was a broadening expanse of worry.

  *

  I took Aliki to school, something Nisha usually did. I also had to leave work for an hour to collect her in the afternoon – my shop assistant, Keti, didn’t work on Mondays. I then had to bring Aliki back to work with me for a while. We made our way through heavy traffic to Onasagorou Street, just by Eleftheria Square, to the main branch of my clinic, Sun City – I am an optician – which sat in a stately row of expensive boutiques, ice-cream parlours, patisseries, restaurants, galleries, cafes, and also the base of the British Council – a converted townhouse on Solomou Square. Aliki amused herself by trying out the least expensive pairs of glasses and doing impressions of people in front of the large mirror at the front. In a pair of metal-rimmed, round specs she pretended to be Gandhi; in some round transparent anti-blue light glasses she was a K-pop star; in a plain brown-framed pair she was Nisha, and she grabbed the feather duster and cleaned the shelves.

  *

  That night, Nisha still hadn’t returned. I made some dinner, but Aliki wasn’t hungry. She sat in front of the TV.

  ‘Your food is on the table. I’ve covered it to keep it warm,’ I said. ‘I’m just popping out to speak to Mrs Hadjikyriacou next door. Find out if she’s seen Nisha. I’ll be outside if you need anything.’

  Aliki nodded and continued to watch the news, which I’m sure she wasn’t really paying any attention to. She seemed preoccupied, and she was sucking the knuckle of her index finger as she had done when she was much younger.

  I’d never paid much attention to the other maids in our neighbourhood before. The maids here did everything – they were hired and paid (lower than the minimum wage) to clean the house, but ended up being child-carers, shop assistants, waitresses. Outside, two women, probably Filipinos, walked along the street with a young Cypriot child between them – a little girl with pigtails, holding each by the hand. She ran and skipped and they lifted her by the arms. In a house down the road a maid whacked the dust out of a rug on the railing of the porch. She waved at the two who were passing. Now, turning the corner, another maid was being pulled along by a huge sand-coloured hunting dog. Outside, Yiakoumi’s shop, yet another maid was bringing in the antiques – displayed on a table during the day – in order to shut up shop for the night. To the right, Theo’s restaurant was starting to get busy, as it was close to dinner time. His two Vietnamese maids dashed about in their rice hats, holding drinks or trays of dips. Each time I saw one of these women, my heart dropped, hoping that Nisha might appear beside them.

  Right next door sat Mrs Hadjikyriacou, who Aliki called the Paper-Lady. She was sitting on her usual deckchair, in the front garden next door to ours. Her skin was so white and creased that she looked as though someone had scrunched her up into a ball and opened her up again. She sat there most of the day, and late into the evening, sometimes until midnight, watching the day go by, the seasons change, and she remembered everything – her mind like a journal, full of pages and pages of the past, or at least every bit of the past that has walked her way. It is a well-known fact that her hair turned white overnight, during the war, when the island was divided. That’s when she started storing everything in her mind, so that nobody could take her soul from her. This is what she told me once, many years ago.

  She sat there now, perched on her chair, watching TV, which had been brought outside; the wire was stretched almost to breaking point, plugged into a socket in the living room. She spat phlegm into a handkerchief, inspected it, then shouted at the TV. She was furious, it seemed, about a decision the president had made.

  I hoped that she might have seen Nisha leave.

  I watched as her maid came out with a tray of fruit and water, placing it on a small table by the old lady’s side.

  ‘I don’t want any,’ she said, flicking her wrist in dismissal, and the maid mumbled something in her own language before returning to whatever she had been doing inside. This maid was new and hadn’t yet learned a word of Greek or English, so they communicated with their respective mother tongues, plus gestures and eye-rolls.

  As usual the Paper-Lady was surrounded by cats, all of which Aliki had named. One of the cats was sitting to attention, staring at her, meowing.

  ‘What is it, my dear?’ she asked, with a sigh. ‘What is it, my darling sesame dough? You want to drink? You want to eat? Come to me and I’ll kiss you!’ In response, the cat turned its back to her. Then, without even looking my way, she lowered the volume on the TV, and said, ‘Petra, come over and have some fruit.’

  I approached, with usual pleasantries about the weather, taking a slice of orange out of courtesy, and then I asked whether she had seen Nisha the previous night or, in fact, that morning.

  Sitting back with her fingers laced together, she searched her mind, her head tilted slightly to the right, towards the light of Yiakoumi’s shop. She fixed her gaze on the window display. ‘According to seven of Yiakoumi’s clocks, it was ten thirty when I saw her. According to one, it
was midnight.’

  I waited for her to say more but instead she scooped up one of the cats and placed it on her lap. The black cat’s eyes were gold, with an area of patchy blue that looked like the Earth from a great distance.

  ‘Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘She was in a hurry. She said something about meeting a man.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Do you think if I sniff my nails they will tell me the answer?’ Her stock phrase.

  She stared at me for a while, as if she was waiting for me to stop chewing. When I swallowed the last bit of orange she tapped the plate with her finger.

  ‘Have some more.’

  I could see that her attention would remain on the plate until I obliged, so I took another slice. She watched me as I bit into it, and as I wiped juice from my chin.

  ‘Was there anything unusual . . . ?’ I began.

  ‘My daughter is coming next week from New Zealand. She’s coming to see me from the other side of the world.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’ Through the crocheted curtain I could see her maid’s silhouette; she looked like she was bending down to wipe the coffee table, the glow of an orange lamp behind her. She was shaking her head, talking to herself about the old lady, no doubt – unless there was something else that had peeved her so badly that she looked like she had taken a bite of a lemon straight from the tree.

  Just at that moment, the bouzouki started playing in the restaurant and the cats, as if on cue, scurried off in that direction.

  ‘Did she say anything else?’ I said. ‘Nisha, I mean.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which way did she go?’

  She pointed to the right. ‘Then she turned left at the end of the road.’

  ‘But that way’s a dead end,’ I said. What would Nisha be doing going down there? It only led to the Green Line, to the military base and the buffer zone that separated the Turkish and Greek parts of the island. Nobody went that way.

  Mrs Hadjikyriacou was looking up at me, examining me. From her corneas, triangular films of tissue threatened to take over her eyes.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know where Nisha is. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, she probably just—’

  She interrupted me: ‘Just what? You mean to tell me she hasn’t returned?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I presume you’ve tried her phone?’

  I nodded again and she looked up to the sky, her silvery eyes restless. She looked so worried that I suddenly had the urge to reassure her.

  ‘Honestly, I’m sure it will be fine. There has to be a reasonable explanation.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe she went to see a friend.’

  ‘No,’ she said again. ‘Nisha would never take off like that, even for a day. You must know that. She is an extremely conscientious young woman.’

  She picked up a slice of orange, brought it to her lips and, seeming to remember that she didn’t want any, tore it up into sections, throwing the pieces on the ground for the cats when they returned.

  Then she reached out and placed a sticky hand on my arm. ‘Petra,’ she said, staring at me hard, like she was trying to see me through a thick mist, ‘there is something not right here.’

  *

  I returned home and checked on Aliki. I found her sitting on her bed in the dark. She was in her pyjamas and sipping a mug of warm milk, which she cradled in her palms. Her school bag was at the foot of the bed and her uniform was hanging ready, on the back of her chair by the desk. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Nisha had been here.

  ‘You’ve eaten?’ I said, and Aliki glanced at me over the mug and nodded. ‘You’re OK?’ Again, she nodded.

  I went over and gave her a kiss on the forehead. That’s when I noticed that the black cat with the different-coloured eyes was sleeping on the bed beside her, at first glance just a gleam in the moonlight, its shiny black fur oily in the darkness. I was about to say that she knew very well that cats weren’t allowed in the house, but, anticipating my admonishment, she quickly said, ‘Monkey has had a tough day. He needs some tender loving care.’

  ‘You’ve named him Monkey?’

  ‘Look at his long, bent tail. I think he swings from trees.’

  I smiled. My clever girl. I backed out of her room and closed the door.

  But I was on edge. I couldn’t shake the feeling of Mrs Hadjikyriacou’s hand on my arm, her insistence that something was amiss. I peered out of the window to see that she had gone inside, the street now dark and empty.

  7

  Yiannis

  I

  N THE MIDDLE OF THE night, Seraphim and I drove out to a beach in Protaras. Once a week, during the autumn migration, he and I would go out to sea to catch birds. These were our most lucrative hunts. We drove to the east coast in Seraphim’s van. Although it was cold in the early hours, Seraphim had his window wide open and drank in big gulps of air. He always did this as we approached the water. I hardly spoke. I couldn’t stop thinking about Nisha. I tried to imagine where she might be, but my mind met only darkness. I had tried ringing her many times but her phone was switched off.

  The villages around us were quiet, only one light was on in a house on a hillside. Soon I could hear the waves.

  You see, I thought you were a different person.

  It was Seraphim who had got me into poaching. Seraphim was in love with money – but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the same about myself. Once upon a time, I had been an executive at Laiki Bank. I lived in a luxury apartment on the other side of the city – the sparkly, fashionable district. My grandfather was a farmer in his former years, and a park ranger thereafter. My ancestors lived the rural life, farmers and shepherds who worked the land. Father was determined that I would make it in the world. He encouraged me to study hard so that I would climb from the soil to the stars!

  And, of course, I did. The banker’s life was appealing, stable. I would be financially secure, rich even, and wouldn’t have to rely on the weather and the seasons, like my fore-fathers had. At least this was what my father told me. I hadn’t realised then that the financial world had its own storms and droughts.

  Before the financial crisis of 2008, Laiki Bank was booming – it was set to become the European investment vehicle of Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund, and it played a pivotal role in the island’s financial services industry, welcoming fresh-faced Russian entrepreneurs who arrived with cash-filled suitcases then set up companies on the island, run by local lawyers and accountants. At one point, bank transfers between Russia and Cyprus were astronomical. Laiki had even handled the affairs of Slobodan Milosevic. His administration moved billions of dollars in cash through Laiki in the 1990s in spite of UN sanctions.

  I loved to tell these stories at swanky dinner parties – people were always impressed. Teresa, my wife at the time, loved that sort of life. She would never have married me if I’d followed the life of my grandfather. Our story was a simple one: she worked at Laiki’s rival bank, we met, we fell in love.

  But Laiki got into fatal trouble because of aggressive expansion into Greece. The balance sheet was overstretched and then the global financial crisis hit and everything went wrong. Laiki was placed under administration and I lost my job, my savings, my wife – in that order. But while the humiliating turn in the bank’s fortunes reflected Cyprus’s deeper troubles, the turn of events in my life shone a light on the black hole that existed at its centre.

  *

  The van rattled along a dirt path. Seraphim began, as usual, to hum an old children’s song. He always hummed this rhyme as we approached the water, something that harked back to the days before the war. But the memory was too buried for me to retrieve it and I never asked him.

  ‘You need to loosen up,’ he said now. ‘I’ve told you so many times, come down to Maria’s with me – I’ll get you sorted. Last night I was with the Filipino girl again. She’s very sweet, yo
u know. If it wasn’t for my wife I think I might fall in love.’

  I remained silent, staring out of the window, watching the approaching opaque darkness of the sea and sky.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Seraphim asked, flicking his eyes towards me. He was about two years older than me and, in spite of all his money, dressed like an odd-job man no matter the occasion. He was a small, dark man with large hands, his hair was mostly uncombed and was receding at the front. Usually unshaven, he reminded me of the rats that live in the sewers along the banks of the Pedieos River. He was married to a Russian woman called Oksana, whom he spoke about often and fondly; but most nights he visited the bars in old Nicosia, searching for the women who had to find another way to make ends meet – as he put it. Nice Romanian, Moldavian, Ukrainian girls – not too expensive – Sri Lankan, Vietnamese, Nepalese maids. Women who came here to make money, one way or another – as he put it. As if he was doing them a favour.

  I turned a blind eye to the crap Seraphim spewed. He was dodgy to the core, but there was something charming about him, a certain warmth. And he was good at keeping secrets. He held steadily to the steering wheel as the van bounced over the rough terrain. Seraphim was the only person in the world who knew about my relationship with Nisha.

  ‘Nisha’s gone,’ I said.

  I could hear the sea now, below us to the right, breathing heavily. The clouds parted and the sky around the moon turned silver. I realised he’d been silent for too long.

  ‘Nisha is gone,’ I said again.

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He was quiet again and he made a right turn now, onto the road that would lead down to the jetty of a small private cove. There was a tiny church made of limestone on this corner, with a huge white cross that was illuminated at night.

  ‘Why would she leave?’ he asked, finally.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She just disappeared.’ I paused. ‘I proposed to her on Saturday night and she disappeared on Sunday night. Well, any time on Sunday, I guess.’