Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  But sometimes we just waited quietly, listening to the sound of the machine, which was loud and clear, even at a distance.

  ‘Sounds like a real bird, Grandad,’ I said, on one such occasion.

  ‘It has a voice of brass and steel,’ he said. ‘Never confuse the two things.’

  At the time, I had no idea what he meant, but I nodded dutifully, like I always did.

  He went on: ‘You see, we have to eat, and we have to survive, and yet we must protect our dignity and our identity. There are things we do to achieve those things. But we can respect the land and the animals that are on it. Always be kind to the land, the people and the animals that are on it. Remember that. It’s the most important rule in the world.’

  This was just after the war, when the island had been divided. My father had fought, and he came back without his right hand and with a new voice. When he came trudging up the mountain, a week after we’d heard on the radio that the war had ended, his eyes were different – they had spots of blood in them, and he barely spoke. He only opened his mouth to complain, or yell about one thing or another. I remembered how his voice would suddenly break the silence. Our Turkish friends had disappeared from their houses in the hills and now we were supposed to refer to them as our enemies. The only thing my father said in his old voice – which I remembered as so earnest, so thoughtful – was that he’d killed a friend down there. Though he never told us who it was.

  After the war, I learnt a lesson I would never forget: how a person can disappear inside themselves, and that, sometimes, like my father, they are never able to find their way back.

  *

  There it was again – the sound of a woman’s voice. As if the wind had opened its mouth and let out a cry. I suddenly remembered where I was: the river to my right, the field to the left. Was that just the wind? A crow maybe? Was my mind playing tricks on me? I looked around.

  ‘Is anyone there?’ I called again, but there was no reply. I walked up and down the river, I trudged through the rain-soaked land, I walked far and wide, covered as much distance as I could, until I was convinced that I was alone.

  I hadn’t collected any snails, and the memories of Nisha and my childhood had drained me. I decided to head back home. But I couldn’t spend another night wondering about Nisha, thinking I had seen her shadow, questioning whether she had gone or not.

  So, before heading up the stairs to my flat, I knocked on Petra’s front door.

  11

  Petra

  A

  LIKI LOOKED OUT OF THE car window at the rain pelting down on the pavement as we waited at the traffic light, on the way to school. She seemed thoughtful and faraway. She’d done her own hair – two plaits hung over each shoulder – and she was wearing a bright blue raincoat over a grey tracksuit and her P.E. trainers. I knew she didn’t want to get any of her Converse wet and dirty. She had about six pairs of various colours and designs, some with flower patterns, others with stars or planets or polka dots. Sometimes she purposely wore odd pairs; how she matched them was of some importance. She kept them in a neat row against the wall just outside her bedroom door, and I’d watch her from time to time as she tried out different combinations, sometimes shaking her head and trying another until she felt that her look was just right. She was very particular about her footwear; she wouldn’t even let the cats sleep on them: pointing a finger, and in her most adult voice, she instructed the cats to sit beside the shoes, not on them. If they didn’t cooperate, which they often didn’t, she showed them the door. As a rule, I didn’t allow cats in the house – they are vermin in these areas – but still they would stroll in when doors were left open in the summer months.

  I stood at the gate, as Nisha would have done, and watched as Aliki walked to the entrance of the school. She was slow in her movements, avoiding the puddles as if they were landmines. Normally she would jump in them in order to make Nisha scold and laugh. Nisha would tell me about it later: ‘That daughter of yours! She drenched her shoes and trousers. She jumps in those puddles like she is Indiana Jones!’

  As Onasagorou is pedestrian only, I parked in one of the back streets and made my way on foot through the rain. By the time I arrived at Sun City, Keti was turning over the open sign on the shop door. She stepped aside to let me in and ran to get me a towel and a coffee. Always eager to please and to learn, she was an aspiring eye surgeon, training at the university of Nicosia, who worked part-time as my assistant. She was brilliant at her job, attentive, meticulous. Sun City attracted an elite clientele; indeed, the city’s most important politicians, actors, hotel owners – and even an Indian prince – came to us so that they could see the world more clearly and with style, so I only hired the best staff. Keti had 20/20 vision, but shrewdly wore a pair of Chanel tortoiseshells without prescription: she knew how to represent our interests. We sold the latest designs from Tom Ford, Cartier, Versace, Dior, Bvlgari and Chopard. I even had embroidered eyewear by Gazusa, and in an alarmed cabinet behind the counter, I kept the most expensive pair – gold framed with pink lenses and encrusted with 2.85 carats of pink diamonds. I loved the craftsmanship of the individual glasses, each a work of art.

  ‘Where is Nisha?’ Keti said, handing me a warm mug of coffee.

  ‘Nisha?’

  ‘It’s Thursday,’ she said. ‘And you are late – we were meant to go through the stock and you have a client in’ – she looked at her watch – ‘twenty-three minutes.’

  ‘Thursday?’ was all I could say at this point. Thursday was the day I brought Nisha in to clean the shop. She would be relieved of her household duties for the day and join me at Sun City to mop and clean the floor, wipe down the shelves and polish the glasses. She would then clean my clinic, followed by the kitchen at the back. She put her heart into it: she knew how important it was to make the shop sparkle.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Keti had lifted her glasses, as if this would make her see better, and she was examining my face closely.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘So where is Nisha?’ she asked again.

  ‘Nisha,’ I repeated.

  Once again, she waited, glasses hovering above her eyes.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  She creased her brow.

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t know where she is. She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone?’ She now lowered the glasses onto her nose and bombarded me with questions: Where did she go? Did she say she was leaving? Do you think she went back to Sri Lanka? Any chance she had enough of you? (‘Joking – don’t look at me like that!’)

  I answered her questions as best I could. I was exhausted. I realised in that moment that the last few days had caught up with me.

  Soon, our first customer came in to collect her prescription sunglasses: Porsche Design with an 18 carat gold frame. She was a new client, with an accent I didn’t recognise. Tall, severe blonde bob, sharp fringe, dressed all in black. She’d first visited the shop a couple of weeks earlier when I’d given her an eye test. She put the glasses on now, and stared at herself in the mirror for a while, then she popped the case into her handbag, paid the rest of the money – she had left a deposit of 250 euros – and went out into the rain wearing her new sunglasses.

  Keti would normally have had a great deal to say about a customer like this. She would have mused about who she was, where she might have come from. She would have come up with ludicrous and yet at the same time almost plausible stories about why she needed to wear such an expensive pair of sunglasses in the middle of a storm. But today she was quiet, and she looked over at me from the back of the store, where she was checking the stock, and I could see that she was concerned.

  The morning proceeded with a few more appointments, some cancellations due to the weather, and just one or two browsers, but it was a mercifully quiet day. Keti went out at lunch and came back with warm haloumi and tomato sandwiches for us both; she closed the shop and brewed coffee. We sat in the kitchen to eat, while the rain continued to fall outside.
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  ‘So, let’s examine this,’ she said, placing one hand on the table, opening it, palm facing up, as if she was holding an eyeball that she was about to dissect.

  I nodded.

  ‘She decided to waste her one day off to spend it with you and Aliki in the mountains?’

  I nodded again, ignoring Keti’s little embellishments, which I had been expecting anyway.

  ‘And while you were there, she asked if she could take the evening off – seeing as she had spent the day practically looking after Aliki – in order to visit—?’

  I nodded.

  ‘To visit whom?’ Keti prompted.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, and added reluctantly, ‘I interrupted her before she could finish her sentence.’

  ‘So, you told her, quite clearly, that she couldn’t go.’

  ‘I didn’t say no, as such. But it was clear that I disapproved.’

  ‘And you have no idea whom she might have wanted to visit?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘So, you went back home, she made dinner, you all sat together to eat, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I went to bed. I was tired, I wanted an early night. I left Nisha to put Aliki to bed and ready her things for school in the morning.’

  ‘And then in the morning . . .’

  ‘In the morning she was gone. She left her passport and a number of other things that are very special to her. I also found a gold ring, like an engagement ring, on her dresser, that I’d never seen before.’

  Keti nodded now, presumably at a loss.

  ‘It’s Thursday today,’ she said. ‘You’ve been to the police?’

  ‘Yesterday.’

  I told her about the whole sorry encounter at the station: what the officer had said, and how I had finally walked out of his office, stepping on his paperwork. But as I relayed the story, I felt a dull ache in my stomach, like something was amiss, something I didn’t understand. And it was then that I realised the officer’s voice had sounded somehow familiar, as if I had been hearing an echo of something that was coming from inside me.

  I couldn’t say this to Keti, but I felt a bloom of guilt at this acknowledgement. Blushing self-consciously, I focused on her.

  ‘You’ve got to search for her yourself,’ she said, slapping her hand meaningfully on the table between us.

  ‘How? I don’t even know where to begin.’

  ‘You’ll figure it out. You can’t leave it like this! You can’t let a woman who has lived with you and helped you for so many years just vanish, as if she was meaningless.’

  I nodded. She was right.

  ‘And your instinct tells you something is wrong?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely.’

  ‘And this is out of character?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then. You have no other choice.’ And that was the last thing she said, before looking at her watch and informing me that lunch was over and our next client would be arriving in about three minutes.

  *

  That evening it continued to rain. The boat was brimming over with water. Water fell through the trees in the garden; it saturated the soil and made the patio glisten like a lake. Aliki stalked around the house, holding onto the black cat as if it was her salvation. Sometimes the cat obliged, purring and rubbing its nose on her ear; other times, it pushed her face away with its paw, scrambled out of her arms with a hiss, and dashed for the window.

  I couldn’t eat that night, but I made a light meal for Aliki. I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with Keti and the things Nilmini had said. I walked in and out of Nisha’s room, hoping to spark a memory, a revelation. Was there something I had missed? Had she mentioned anything that I’d forgotten? It was like attempting to recall a half-forgotten dream.

  I kept hearing Keti’s words: You’ve got to go and search for her yourself. Heavy words; words that hit me hard with the weight of responsibility. And last night Aliki had asked me to find her.

  Yes, this was something I had to do, although I hadn’t the slightest idea how.

  *

  I decided that I would speak to more of Nisha’s friends. It seemed like a place to start. I wondered if they knew anything – and if they did, whether they would tell me.

  I knew Nisha was friends with the maids at the gated mansion at the end of the street, the one with two hunting dogs so, on Friday afternoon, I shut my practice early and headed home. The rain had finally stopped, but very few customers had come in – I had been alone in the shop, as Keti studied at university on Fridays.

  I decided to make dinner early, then walk over to the gated mansion down the street. But before I’d even started cooking, while Aliki was in the garden attempting to empty the boat of water, the doorbell rang.

  It was Yiannis from upstairs. The light from Yiakoumi’s shop glowed around him and he stood there staring at me for a moment too long before he spoke.

  ‘Petra,’ he said, ‘sorry to disturb you. I am wondering . . .’ There was a pause, and a shuffle of his feet, as if he was about to change his mind and walk away. ‘. . . is Nisha in?’ He was almost a silhouette, so I couldn’t see the expression on his face, but there was something guarded, uncertain, in the tone of his voice.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Yiannis, but she’s not.’

  He ran his hand through his hair, streaks of silver illuminated in the light that poured from the display window behind him. His movements were so hesitant that I could almost hear all those clocks ticking.

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘Why?’ I said, perhaps too quickly, and he brought his hand to his face and rubbed his stubble. Then he looked over my shoulder, into the open-plan living room, his eyes scanning.

  ‘Well . . . because I haven’t seen her,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her all week, and I’ve been worried.’

  There was a desperation in him now that I didn’t understand. He was lost and vulnerable, like those stray dogs that wander the neighbourhood looking for someone to love. Why was he so concerned about Nisha? There was something niggling at me, something I think I had known for a long time but refused to believe, and it was this thought that made me invite him in.

  He was dressed nicely, as if he was heading to a bar for a drink – a perfectly ironed black shirt, opened slightly at the collar, a pair of dark blue jeans – but mud covered his shoes. Mud that hadn’t yet dried and crusted.

  He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room: it was the first time he’d been inside, and he glanced left and right at the furniture, the photographs on the console table, the dining table. He looked over to the kitchen, where Nisha had spent so much of her time, scrubbing and cooking. It was strange, though – he looked around like he knew the place.

  Now, in the light, I could see clearly the desperation that I had sensed in the darkness; it was mainly in the deep crease of his brow and the restlessness of his eyes. We stood there for a moment, neither of us speaking. He was a good-looking man: very dark eyes with thick lashes, and a soft beard that was neatly trimmed, partly black, partly grey. It was strange to have him standing in my living room. We hardly ever spoke, apart from short pleasantries in the garden about the chicken pen or the weather or how the tomatoes and prickly pears were doing.

  I wanted to understand his connection to Nisha. I had seen them talking many times in the garden; I had seen the looks they gave each other, of course I had – a touch of the hand, low whispers in the evening . . . but, if there had been something going on between them, I may have needed to dismiss Nisha, even though I couldn’t imagine my life without her. Nobody allowed their maids to have sexual or romantic relationships – it was almost unheard of, apart from those maids who ended up marrying their employers.

  I couldn’t help glancing down at the mud on his shoes, wondering where he’d been. I suddenly realised I should have told him to take them off at the door – It’s not as though Nisha’s here to k
eep the floors clean. And that thought alone made me suddenly feel so alone, the house so empty without her.

  I offered him a drink and he thanked me and asked for alcohol. ‘Anything,’ he said. ‘Something strong.’

  I went to the kitchen and poured us both some zivania.

  When I came back, Yiannis had taken off his shoes and was standing by the console table in his socks, looking at the photographs. He must’ve seen me looking at his feet.

  ‘I’m sorry that I came in with such muddy shoes,’ he said. ‘I was out collecting snails. I’ve had so much on my mind that I’m finding it hard to think.’ Before I could respond, he said. ‘Is that your husband?’ signalling with his eyes Stephanos in his military gear.

  ‘It is.’

  He nodded. ‘Your daughter looks like him.’

  I noticed now that his shoes were lined up neatly by the door.

  I put the drinks down on the coffee table and lit the fire. He joined me, perching, uncomfortably, on the edge of the L-shaped sofa. He took a long gulp of zivania and for a second it made his jaw clench and his eyes shine. This wasn’t a man who was used to drinking spirits.

  I wasn’t sure if he was waiting for me to speak, but I didn’t know what to say anyway. I could have started talking about Nisha, telling him what had been going on this week, but apart from being my tenant, this man was more or less a stranger.

  He took another big gulp from his glass and this time scrunched up his eyes. Then he ran his finger over the rim of the glass, again lost in thought.

  Eventually I said, ‘So, you’re worried about Nisha? Do you know her well?’ This made him put the glass on the table and rub his eyes with his hands, as if I had just woken him up. He nodded and picked up the glass again.

  He was nervous, I could see that, and he opened his mouth a few times to say something, but at first no voice came out. ‘When was the last time you saw her?’ he eventually asked.