Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  ‘So there is nothing more recent?’

  ‘No, madam. They are dated.’

  ‘I see.’

  I must have looked disappointed and at a loss, for she said: ‘Madam, even if we do not find anything obvious, there may be other information which might give us a better understanding.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said, smiling. And, just for a moment, she grabbed my fingers and squeezed them with hands that were softer and warmer than I had expected. I looked up and saw she had tears in her eyes.

  ‘It is beautiful, the journal. Nisha should be a writer. In the letters, she tells all about her life back home and about her life here. I can hear my friend’s voice as I read. I miss her very much.’

  ‘I know Nilmini,’ I said, ‘So do I.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I have not found what you are looking for.’

  *

  In the evening I invited Mrs Hadjikyriacou to stay and join us for supper. She demurred at first, saying that Ruba wouldn’t know what to do without her there for the evening meal, but Aliki pleaded and finally she agreed. I made dhal curry but it was nothing like Nisha’s – it lacked flavour and I added way too much coconut milk so it was like mush. But Aliki ate it regardless. After dinner, we sat by the fire drinking tea.

  Mrs Hadjikyriacou’s cloudy, silvery eyes regarded me with certainty and warmth. Then she turned her attention to Aliki. ‘Come here, child,’ she said. ‘I can tell you a story. What is your favourite? And why in God’s name are you wearing odd shoes?’

  Aliki giggled. ‘I like odd things,’ she said. ‘I’d like to hear a story.’

  It was lovely to hear Aliki’s voice, I drank it in. With Nisha gone, my daughter had no one else to speak to at home. Except the cats. Her voice was lost to me, we both knew that.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Mrs Hadjikyriacou said. ‘Sit here beside me. I’ll tell you about Foinikas, or Palm Tree village, the place where I was born. I lived there all my life, I got married there and had five children there. It’s such an old place. People lived there since the times of the crusaders. Do you know about the crusaders?’

  Aliki nodded. ‘We learnt about it at school. Is that when you were born?’

  ‘No!’ She laughed. ‘How the hell old do you think I am, you little monkey? Eight hundred years old?’

  Aliki laughed and laughed and then she quietened at the sight of the old woman’s knitted brow.

  ‘Well, let me begin,’ she said. ‘Are you ready?’

  Aliki sat straight and nodded.

  ‘The knight commander’s residence was built on the highest point of the village. The village was abandoned in 1974 after the war that divided the island. Today it is often flooded by water from the dam, but back in the day – well, what can I tell you, it was a place of beauty.’

  Seeing my daughter held rapt by Mrs Hadjikyriacou’s tale, I felt a pang of jealousy. I had never been able to command Aliki’s attention, but then what did I offer her? Nisha had told her the stories, Nisha had played the games, teasing her imagination and teaching her how to see the world. I remembered the day we had gone up to the mountains and Nisha and Aliki had sat together on the bus, while I sat opposite them across the aisle, next to an old man who had been carrying a jasmine plant on his lap. He must have been growing it indoors by a sunny window for the flowers smelled as if it were summer and I remembered how strange it was to be enveloped by the scent during that chilly October day. The old man had snored, his head bopping gently to the movement of the bus as we headed up the mountain, and Nisha and Aliki had played I Spy.

  ‘I spy with my little eye, something beginning with N!’ Aliki said.

  ‘Hm, that’s a hard one,’ Nisha said. She pretended to look all around the bus, then leaned over Aliki and made a big deal of looking out of the window.

  Aliki giggled.

  ‘Hmmm, let me see. Nature?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Erm . . . nuts!’

  ‘Where do you see nuts?’

  ‘There are almond trees on the hills.’

  ‘Well, if there are, I can’t see them.’

  ‘How about’ – Nisha was looking around again, this time at the other passengers – ‘novel!’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Aliki, this is too difficult.’

  ‘Keep going!’ she said.

  ‘Nylon? And before you ask, the woman who is reading the novel – to your right – is wearing nylon tights.’

  ‘That’s very good,’ Aliki said. ‘But no.’

  ‘Necklace.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neck!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nun?’

  I remembered Aliki looking around her at this point, then she started to laugh again. ‘Nisha, where do you see a nun?’

  ‘We passed a church and a nun was outside in the garden.’

  ‘You see everything,’ Aliki said.

  ‘You should be more observant,’ Nisha said.

  ‘OK, do you give up?’

  ‘Let me try one last time . . .’ There was a long pause. ‘Nostril!’

  ‘The answer,’ said Aliki, ‘is Nisha.’

  ‘Me?’

  Aliki had nodded.

  ‘That’s cheating! I can’t see me!’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘I see you!’

  ‘I would never have guessed that. I could have gone on all week and I would never have guessed that.’

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ Aliki said, in her most adult voice, ‘that you saw everything but yourself ?’

  *

  On Friday night, around 10 p.m., I received a phone call from Soneeya. She was frantic. ‘Madam, please come meet me at the gate, I have some information. Will you come right away?’

  I told her yes, of course. I looked in on Aliki, who was sleeping peacefully in her room. Mrs Hadjikyriacou was still out, sitting in her garden as usual, and I asked if she wouldn’t mind coming in and staying with Aliki for a while.

  ‘Of course, my love,’ she said, placing her hand on mine. ‘My daughter is no longer coming to see me – something to do with work – they had to cancel the trip. So I have all the time in the world. Go and do what you need to do and don’t worry about me.’

  I thanked her by placing a kiss on her cheek, like I would have done with my own mother or grandmother, and left her sitting in the living room by the fireplace flicking through a fashion magazine.

  When I arrived at the mansion, Binsa and Soneeya were both waiting for me, standing behind the bars of the huge gate, beneath the glare of the security light. The two hunting dogs were out of their cages. One had its nose pressed between the bars of the gate, sniffing the air; the other lay flat, its huge head resting on its front paws. Their sand-coloured coats were shiny, their muscles defined in the spotlight.

  ‘Madam,’ Soneeya said. ‘There has been another woman who vanished.’

  ‘What do you mean, Soneeya?’

  ‘Soneeya is saying there is another woman who is missing. This week, we called on a few friends to see if anyone has heard from Nisha. Our friend told us that her friend’s sister, who works in a house with a family on the other side of Nicosia, well, she vanished one day. She went out at night and never came back.’

  I tried to sort this out in my head.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘About three week ago, madam,’ said Binsa.

  ‘And they’ve heard nothing from her?’

  ‘Nothing, madam. Not one thing,’ replied Soneeya.

  This made my mouth dry. I was still hoping that, at any moment, Nisha would return, but here they were telling me a story of another maid going missing without explanation.

  ‘We don’t know anything about the circumstances,’ I said. ‘There could be very good reasons why your friend’s sister is missing from her place of work.’

  Soneeya shook her head but said nothing.

  Binsa reached into her apron pocket and took out a smal
l scrap of paper. ‘We have a number, a person for you to call. You can go see him.’

  Through the bars, I took the piece of paper from Binsa’s hand and read the details that had been hastily scribbled across it: Mr Tony The Blue Tiger, Limassol 09 ---------------

  ‘Who is this Mr Tony? What is the Blue Tiger?’

  ‘The Blue Tiger, madam, is a place I have never been. It is a lovely place, they say, where all the workers meet on Sunday and make food and dance and eat. It is Mr Tony’s restaurant the rest of the week. But Sunday he looks after all the workers. He finds them jobs. He helps them when they’re in trouble. Sometimes girls stay at his home until they find an employer who is kind. They say Mr Tony is a good man and he knows so many things. If there is a problem, every maid goes to Mr Tony.’

  ‘I don’t see how he will be able to help me,’ I said. ‘The Blue Tiger is in another town. What information could he possibly have about Nisha?’

  However, I remembered that Nisha had recently been to Limassol. Maybe he would know her, or her cousin Chaturi?

  ‘He knows about the other woman who vanished. We do not have any more answer, but Mr Tony, he may have more answer.’ Soneeya’s eyes penetrated mine with urgency, as though she were about to take flight and go and find Nisha herself – if only she had had the freedom to do so.

  The dogs picked up on her restlessness, for they were both pacing about behind her. With their coats golden in the lamplight, their heads bowed, muscles rippling, tails down, for a moment they looked to me like lions. Lions in captivity. Lions who had been stolen from their land.

  As I turned towards home, it occurred to me to go to the late-night bar by the Green Line, Maria’s, which was located at the end of the street in the direction that Mrs Hadjikyriacou had seen Nisha heading the night she had disappeared. I wondered if someone there might know something about Nisha. I knew I was on borrowed time with Aliki home in bed, but maybe I would just stop in. Even just leave a flyer with them.

  Two women were standing outside beneath a lamp-post smoking. In spite of the chilly night, they wore strappy tops and mini-skirts and were deep in conversation. I entered a place full of smoke. It reeked of beer. On a nearly empty dance floor there was a belly dancer in sequins and bright pink, rolling her stomach and tinkling bells. Men lined the bar. Waitresses in tight black clothes came and went with silver trays of dips and drinks. Candles had been lit on some of the tables, but nothing could make this bar look elegant: it was seedy and dark and it smelled of lust and greed and desperation.

  I felt very out of place in my jogging bottoms, trainers and woolly cardigan whose sleeves were too long, but I was inside now, and knew it would be worth asking some questions. A few men turned with leering eyes to look at me but, to my relief, turned away again. I went to the bar and ordered a sparkling mineral water: I wanted to keep my wits about me in this place. The man beside me had a girl who barely looked eighteen sitting on his lap. As she licked his ear, he played with the strap of her pink dress and kissed her upper arm. I looked away. On my other side, a woman sat alone, smoking an e-cigarette that smelled like cherries. Her black hair reached the small of her back.

  Once I paid for my drink, I asked the waitress if I could speak privately to the manager.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m looking for work.’

  She looked me up and down as if to say Really? and pointed to a wooden door at the back of the bar.

  ‘He’s in his office,’ she said. ‘Knock three times and wait.’

  I did as she said. I waited for more than five minutes before the door opened and a small man who looked a lot like a hamster opened the door. He had a huge grin, dead-white teeth and a pot belly that spilled over his trousers. But he carried himself like a king.

  ‘What can I do for you, young lady?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m not exactly a young lady anymore,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be surprised.’ He smiled widely.

  I had no idea what he meant.

  He invited me into his office and I sat on a low stool by a high antique desk. He sat in a pivoting office chair – soft leather with broad arms – and looked down at me.

  ‘You knocked three times. You’re looking for work.’

  ‘No.’

  He raised his eyebrows and, for the first time, irritation erupted on his face. He glanced at the clock on the wall. In spite of the music outside, this office was strangely quiet.

  ‘I know that many foreign domestic workers work here,’ I said, ‘and because of that I wondered if you have ever seen this woman.’ From my handbag I pulled out one of the flyers Keti and I had made and pointed at Nisha’s picture.

  From the top pocket of his shirt the man retrieved a cheap pair of gold-rimmed glasses and put them on, taking the flyer from me and studying it. He seemed deep in thought for a very long time. Finally, he looked at me and said, ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve never seen her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s never been in here?’

  ‘Well, if she has, I never saw her. But I don’t sit by the front door and memorise faces.’ He glanced again at the clock and stood up.

  ‘There are so many foreign workers here, they might have seen Nisha, they might know something,’ I continued, desperately.

  ‘Nisha, huh?’ he said and smiled. ‘Do you know that in Sanskrit, Nisha means “night”?’

  I told him that I didn’t know that.

  ‘All the women I have ever met called Nisha are beautiful and mysterious. If I had met her, I definitely would have remembered. Leave the flyer with me and I’ll put it up. Don’t worry.’

  I decided to hand out flyers to some of the women. Many of them were foreign domestic workers; there was a chance that they may have known Nisha, or at least someone may have seen her that night. The women here were usually tucked away, wrapped up safely in our domestic routines. It struck me how one person’s emancipation sometimes relies on the servitude of another. These thoughts tormented me. I feared that I would never be able to tell Nisha what I had understood.

  I stood there in the candlelight, clutching on to Nisha’s flyers.

  On the table near me, three young women sat talking. They laughed. They drank hot tea in tiny glasses.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, awkwardly, feeling that I was intruding.

  All eyes looked up. ‘Good evening madam,’ said the woman closest to me.

  ‘I’m wondering if you have seen this woman?’ I placed one of the flyers on the table and they leaned in to take a look.

  ‘Yes!’ the one on the left said. ‘I know her!’ She was a slim woman with thick black curls.

  ‘Me too!’ said the one next to her. ‘That is Nisha . . . I forget her family name now.’

  The first, who had placed her cup of tea on the table, was leaning in, looking concerned. ‘Well, that is my friend, Nisha. Sometimes we go to church on Sundays, when she is free; she meets me at the other café around corner from here, the one where all of us girls meet on Sundays, and we have a cup of tea together.’

  ‘Nisha has gone missing,’ I said.

  ‘When?’ asked the woman who hadn’t spoken yet, startled.

  ‘Two weeks ago. Do you know anything? The police said she might have gone to the north of the island.’

  The first woman laughed now, but with a darkness that seemed to extinguish even the dim light. ‘They always think these things. They think we are thieves, too. My madam thought I stole her wedding ring. That’s how I go fired. That’s how I ended up here.’ The woman shook her head and suddenly glanced down at Nisha’s poster. She stared at it for a long time. ‘I hope you find her, madam,’ she said.

  As I walked away, I realised that I had not asked the women their names. They had called me ‘Madam’. From that point on, I held out my hand and introduced myself.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Petra.’

  I met so many women that night. Diwata Caasi, a sixty-one-year-old woman from the Philippines, who had bee
n forced to drink water from a jam jar because she was only a maid, and the food was rationed so that she was eating less than the cat. She eventually left her employer and had nowhere to turn.

  Mutya Santos, from the bay-side city of Manila, who used to be a midwife. She loved her elderly employer and had dinner with her every night, but when the old lady passed away Mutya was placed with a man who kept touching her, who walked in on her while she showered, who came to her room while she slept. She had complained to the agency who did nothing to help. When her employer found out, he fired her. Again, she was left with nowhere to go and huge debts.

  Ayomi Pathirana, from Sri Lanka. Her parents were both farmers. As a child she would wake up early every morning to help her parents on the farm before going to school. Later, she left college as they were financially hard-up and found a job in a bookstore for two years; but the money was not good, she could not progress and her parents were getting old. Her cousin encouraged her to apply for work as a nanny abroad. She went to Kuwait, where she was faced with difficulties. Eventually, she made plans to come to Cyprus, where she found similar problems. She was so young when she came here. Then she met a Cypriot man who promised to get her work, and though it was the wrong kind of work, she could not return to Sri Lanka because of the debts she had.

  Etisha, from Nepal, who had to leave her one-year-old daughter, Feba, the source of her light, because she and her husband could not find work back home. Initially she came here as a student; she was promised work, but when she arrived there was nothing.

  Every single one of them had a story. I could have sat there all night listening. But the bars on the windows, the flailing light, made me feel trapped. I just wanted to get out of there. But the women’s stories . . . they moved me, they opened something inside me.

  One of the girls I spoke to began to cry. She wasn’t intending to. I showed her the flyer of Nisha. She didn’t recognise her. Then I asked her where she was from, and instead of words, tears flowed out, down her cheeks, smudging her makeup. For a moment I slipped my hand in hers. She looked at me with black eyes that reflected the candlelight. ‘I want to go home, madam,’ was all she said. She did not tell me where home was.