Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  I must have stood like that for half an hour, maybe more. Like a cat, Aliki came in and out of the living room, standing beside me for a while and leaving again. She was anxious. I could hear it in the way she moved, in the urgency of her footsteps.

  The olive tree opposite was illuminated by the shop lights. Yiakoumi came out and sat beneath it with a coffee. A woman was singing at Theo’s restaurant – I couldn’t see her because the men sitting beneath the grapevine at the tables around her obscured the view, but her voice was pitch-perfect, so full of pathos, so full of beauty and sadness, that something welled up inside me and I began to cry.

  Who was this woman who sang in a foreign tongue? Where had she come from? What had she wished for before coming here? These questions brought me back to Nisha in a way that I had never thought about her before. I had failed to recognise that she too was a woman with pain and hopes. I had known this only as a distant thought – I had never absorbed it into my heart. For she too had lost her husband. She too had come from an island ravaged by war over the years, one besieged by colonialists. Its beauty and its people had suffered too. And these things live on: they carry themselves silently into the future. Who was Nisha? What had life taught her? Why had she travelled such a great distance? To save her daughter . . . from what?

  I had never asked these questions.

  I knew that she treasured the locket. I knew how she loved Aliki. I knew the taste of her food, the spices and curries and creams. I knew how she dusted and vacuumed, how she ironed the clothes, how she wrote careful shopping lists, taking her time with each letter, each word, as if she were writing a poem. I knew how she packed the groceries in perfect order so that she could unpack them more easily. I knew she had a copy of the Buddhist scriptures by her bed and a fat little statue of the Buddha beside it. I knew that when she washed fruit, she’d watch the water fall and get lost for a while.

  I didn’t know Nisha.

  Now that I could hear this woman’s song – a melody that told a story I couldn’t understand – I hoped with all of my heart that it wasn’t too late.

  I felt Aliki standing beside me; I thought she was going to put her hand in mine. But when I turned, she was nowhere to be seen.

  *

  Aliki was sitting out in the garden in the boat again. She was rowing and humming to herself. I went outside, turned an empty plant pot over and sat on it, a little distance away from her. The trees around the garden created a shelter from the wind. Above, the moon shone brightly in the dark sky but, around it, thick clouds were gathering – an indication of a brewing storm. The black cat was in the garden now, sprawled across the patio, purring. I watched it, contemplatively. If only it could speak.

  ‘Would you like to come in?’.

  I turned and saw that Aliki was looking in my direction. ‘You want me to sit in the boat?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  So, I climbed in opposite her and she gave me the olive branch to hold. The cat jumped in with us and snuggled up against her thigh. I glanced over at the glass doors of Nisha’s room.

  ‘She loves me,’ Aliki said, and I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Nisha or the cat.

  ‘I know,’ I replied, and whichever it was, this seemed to satisfy her as she started to row with the oar she was holding.

  ‘You have to row on the other side, because if you don’t we’ll end up just going around in circles. This is why it’s important to be balanced. Because then you’ll go around in circles if you’re not.’

  Her words made me chuckle there was so much truth in them. I moved to sit beside her, and began to row with the olive branch, to the rhythm that Aliki had set.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said.

  ‘To the Sea Above the Sky. This is where I go with Nisha. It’s lovely up there. Sometimes a bit scary, but not always.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, matching her movements still.

  I was hoping that she would tell me more, but she had fallen silent. Her last words had floated away, high into the sky, and were mere dots up above, like helium balloons at carnivals when I was a girl: after all the sweets and colour and noise, I would release them at the end of the day and watch them float away.

  Finally, Aliki spoke. ‘Mum, please find her,’ she said. ‘I really want you to find her.’

  At that moment, the sky opened, and rain began to pour down on us.

  The hare is drenched. Its fur looks oily in the sunlight that shines intermittently through the clouds. The rain falls into the red lake. The rain falls onto the yellow rocks, forming streams of gold. The rain clangs against the steel of the gallows frame and the metallic structure creaks. Water begins to fill its hollow shell.

  In the fields beyond, it falls through the leaves of the pecan and fruit trees. It falls down upon the wheat and barley fields. No one is out today; even in the village, doors and windows and shutters are closed, and water runs from the eaves of buildings.

  Rain is always a surprise. The villagers are relieved because the earth needs to drink. Not so long ago were the scorching summer days when the water barrels were empty, the land dry as a bone. Now, the trees are cool in the drenching. When the rain stops, the locals will come out to collect the pecans before the crows do.

  There is a chapel in this village which is silent and empty, but slightly further away, in Agrokipia the church bells can be heard this morning and every morning. Built by the Hellenic mining company, the church served as a protector of the miners, who risked their lives underground. Far away, across the dividing line, the birds can hear the very distant sound of morning prayer from the mosque.

  Somewhere in the middle, amongst the rainfall, the two sounds meet and touch and join in union and fall down upon the hare, washing away the dirt and the hatching maggots, washing away the dried blood, the skin that has cracked open into wounds.

  10

  Yiannis

  F

  OR TWO DAYS IT RAINED. It was so bad that water streamed into small rivers along the cobbled streets. At night, the customers at Theo’s reluctantly went inside because nobody could sit beneath the vines in the pouring rain. We can survive the cold – with the warmth of outdoor heaters and clay ovens in the taverns – but the rain, though rare, sends everyone indoors. Even Mrs Hadjikyriacou locked herself away. Even the cats disappeared.

  For those two days I stayed in. It took me almost that long to clean all the birds from the hunt with Seraphim, to pull out their feathers and soak them. I had to do it in batches. In the spare room I had three large fridges, industrial size. I checked the orders and separated the birds into containers of various sizes and labelled them, before storing them in the fridges. There were one or two establishments – a hotel and a restaurant in Larnaca – who had requested the birds be pickled, so those I soaked in vinegar.

  During these dark days, I tried not to think about Nisha. But it didn’t work – of course it didn’t. The rain pelted down on the window from the gutters, drowning out all other sound, so that I felt my solitude keenly.

  Nisha’s absence was even louder than the rain.

  Down in the garden, the boat filled with water and looked like it was going to sink, like it was doomed.

  *

  Nisha loved the rain. She would lie on my bed, near the long glass doors, and watch it coming down. She liked to watch water falling. It reminded her of something, she’d said, though what that thing was, I didn’t know. A secret memory.

  When it rained, she wanted me to make her Turkish coffee in a small cup, with some sesame biscuits in a saucer.

  ‘It’s nice to be served sometimes,’ she said, laughing. How she savoured that coffee, dipping the biscuit in until it became moist and dark.

  ‘Back home we drink tea and chew betel,’ she would say. Always. A mantra. As if she couldn’t quite allow herself to enjoy the pleasures of one world without being pulled into the other. Her home was always waiting for her. This was the feeling I had and it made me want to touch her, to feel the soft
dark skin on her thighs and stomach, to wrap my limbs around her and hold her there. But instead, I would simply sit beside her, sensing that at these times she needed company more than comfort.

  ‘It’s weird to think,’ she said once, ‘how the British occupied both of our countries. What they took and what they left behind . . .’ and the sentence remained incomplete as Nisha’s sentences often did, so that I had to imagine what might have come after. I guess we both finished her sentences with our own thoughts.

  She told me about Nuwara Eliya, up in the hills of central Sri Lanka, far from her hometown of Galle in the south. ‘That’s where most of the English people settled,’ she said, ‘up there – because they liked the cold weather. It’s about fifteen degrees! And they built typical English houses.’ There was a note of disgust in her voice on the word typical, a scrunching of her eyes.

  I felt close to her at these times – there was this thing we shared, the British occupation, something we could both understand: tales passed down, culture and land stolen, that insatiable fight for freedom and identity. I imagined these houses built with red brick and slanting roofs and neat front gardens, misplaced amongst the rainforest and blue magpies and jackfruit trees. But then, I had never set foot in the place where Nisha had grown up, never seen the paddy fields that she’d speak of so often.

  ‘Tiryak is one of the six realms of rebirth in Buddhism,’ she said once, when the rain had just stopped, and she was watching snakes and snails coming out on the street below, the birds re-emerging from the trees. ‘This is when one is reborn as an animal. It makes me wonder . . . imagine being reborn as a snail!’ She had taken a sip of thick black coffee and been thoughtful for a while. ‘When I was a child in Galle, there was a frogmouth owl that visited me at night. It was a female, so lightly spotted and white, about twenty centimetres tall, with a large head and a flattened, hooked bill. In the daytime it must have slept in the forest. Its wings were so soft that it flew silently. One night, on my sister’s eleventh birthday, it came to our bedroom window. After that, it came every night for a week, so I started to leave the window open, and then it would fly in and sit on my sister’s bed. But she wasn’t there. She had already died.’

  ‘You had a sister?’ I asked. She had never mentioned a sister before.

  ‘She died when she was ten. She was born with a broken heart. This is what my mother said – that some babies are born with a broken heart because they felt so much sadness in a past life, and they are not ready to live again. She had an operation when she was three, had a scar running down her chest like a beautiful tree branch. Sometimes she got me to draw flowers around it, with my mum’s lip pencil. She wanted the scar to look pretty, like the places in the tropical forest. That’s what she said. One day, she just didn’t wake up.’

  I reached out and took Nisha’s hand in mine; it was warm, and she squeezed my fingers.

  ‘The owl would come in and sit down on my sister’s favourite book – The Mahadenamutta and His Pupils. She loved those stories. She would ask me to read them to her every night. One day, I shooed the owl off the book and started to read. The owl sat beside me and watched me turning the pages. I think it was listening! It came again and again for a whole year, and I read that book every time. On my sister’s next birthday, it disappeared.’

  She squeezed my fingers again and remained silent. She looked out of the window, and I did too.

  ‘I love the way the snail trails glimmer in the light,’ she had said.

  ‘I love you, Nisha,’ I had replied.

  There wasn’t even a pause.

  ‘I didn’t come here to love anyone,’ she said, pulling her hand out of mine. ‘I came here to send money to my daughter.’ She was so deliberate with her words, as if she had rehearsed them. The way she had stressed anyone, with a fierceness in her eyes, made me reluctant to say anything else to her. I nodded and she put her hand on my knee, then dunked a biscuit in the coffee.

  *

  Remembering this now, I was all the more convinced that I had scared Nisha away with my proposal, that it had finally been the thing that had been too much for her. She had probably packed her belongings and gone home without telling me. But I had proposed on Saturday and she had left on Sunday. How would she have had time to reserve a flight so quickly? Something didn’t quite add up. Perhaps she had already decided to leave before my proposal? And, once I had proposed, that had made it even harder to tell me, so she had just left. I decided that this was the most probable explanation. But I still couldn’t be sure.

  I noticed that the little bird was struggling to open its right wing. I filled up a smaller container with about an inch of water and placed it in there to bathe. I didn’t think its wing was dislocated and I hoped it was bruised rather than broken. The bird moved around in the container, splashing its beak into the water, turning once or twice to glance in my direction. Each time it did this my heart fell to my stomach. When the bird finished its bath it hopped out, without opening its right wing at all, and ate some of the berries that I had put on a plate beside the container.

  Eventually, it stopped raining and the sun came out. I decided to head to the river to find some snails: there’d be an abundance of them now after the rain, and I just couldn’t sit still.

  It seemed that the river had overflowed, carrying along with it all manner of detritus. There were plastic containers and plastic bags, barbed wire, car wheels and hubcaps, a pair of sunglasses, a yellow foam mattress clinging to the side of a tree, even a dead cow. A stench travelled along with it, most likely from the north part of the island, which was often polluted by spills from a badly maintained sewage system. The smells travelled across the water with a southern blowing wind, like today.

  Suddenly, I heard a voice – a woman’s cry – so quick and sharp I wasn’t sure I actually had heard it. I couldn’t distinguish voice from wind from rush of river.

  ‘Hello?’ I called across the water. But no reply came, even when I called again.

  *

  In the mountains, the water is clear and fresh, nothing like the water down here. Before it gets contaminated by human waste, you can drink from it and swim in it; there are waterfalls that pour down amongst the trees. It’s the kind of water one might imagine in paradise, if such a place existed.

  I went up with Nisha last winter, up to the hills above the valley to sit by the river. She wanted me to show her where my grandparents and parents had lived, where I had grown up – the old farmhouse with the arches was now owned by tourists, who came only in the summer. The rest of the time the building was dark and empty. Nisha wore an abundance of clothing: a scarf, a woolly hat, thick gloves, two pairs of socks, thermal tights beneath her jeans, a thermal top beneath her jumper, and her big puffy coat with the fake fur running around its hood. All this, and her teeth were still chattering! ‘See,’ she had said, ‘isn’t it nice to see the place where you grew up, because now I think I know you better.’ She planted a big, cold kiss on my cheek.

  You see, I thought you were a different person.

  If I followed the river through time, would I find Nisha at the top dressed in all her cold weather abundance? Would I find my father and grandfather there with flocks of sheep, both with high boots so they could walk easily though the fields, sheepdogs by their side? The sheep roamed free in the pastures – back then, the borders between farms were fluid, they weren’t divided by fences but instead by trails of wild herbs, like rosemary and thyme.

  There had been two sheds attached to the farmhouse, one for churning the milk to make haloumi and anari, and the other for spinning wool into yarn. My mother and grandmother used the yarn to knit blankets. The men – including me, though I was just a boy – would load the mules with cheese, yoghurt, milk and rolled-up warm woollen throws and head out to the farmers’ market. My grandfather, strong as an ox and with a head of thick white hair, loved his animals, caring for them as if they were his children; although it’s true that he killed around four or five la
mbs a year – one especially for Easter after the long fast. The meat was clean and pure. We also had some chickens for fresh eggs, and a dozen turkeys.

  I told Nisha all this when we went to the hills, and she had a similar look on her face as she did that day when she had seen the photograph. She held my hand tightly, as if the wind might blow me away.

  What I didn’t tell her was that sometimes my grandfather and I would go hunting for songbirds. I didn’t want to tell her this. My grandfather had shown me how to make the lime sticks. We would make them together in the farmhouse and put them out in the sun to dry, then we would go to the woods and catch about ten birds. He had a singing bird mechanism which had been made in Paris by a French watchmaker who had perfected the sound. There was a bird on this automaton, meticulously crafted, adorned with real feathers. A wind-up key animated the bird and produced the sound. This device, which fit comfortably into the palm of my grandfather’s hand, was made of brass and steel components and had a leather bellow. When he wound the key, the movement pumped the bellow which sent air through a tiny whistle, producing the most extraordinary song. If the key was fully wound, the bird would sing for about half an hour.

  He would always ask me to wind the key, while we stood in the forest of the mountains, just above the valley. Then he would balance the device in the branch of a tree, covering the metal with leaves so that the birds would not see it glinting in the sun. He made sure not to put up too many sticks. He didn’t want to kill any birds unnecessarily. He just wanted to catch enough so that the family could eat some meat in the winter months. Once the lime sticks were set, we would find ourselves a spot in another part of the woods and wait. To pass the time, he often told me stories – Greek myths and legends of Panhellenism and of fantastical beings – all things that, according to my grandfather, had spurred the Greek Cypriots to fight for independence but, at the same time, had convinced some of them of their invincibility. They had a sense of entitlement and desire to join with Greece that was fierce and unforgiving. ‘The voice of myth is powerful,’ he would say. These were his favourite words.