Songbirds

by Christy Lefteri

  *

  At exactly 5 a.m. the iPad rang again. I answered it. Kumari stared back at me, confused. Once again, she was in her school uniform, purple rucksack on her shoulders. This time her hair was down, straight as needles.

  ‘Hello, Mr Yiannis,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Kumari.’

  ‘Can I speak to Amma?’

  I paused for only a second: I didn’t want her to pick up on my anxiety.

  ‘I’m sorry, Kumari, your mum is at work again.’

  She thought for a moment, clearly sceptical. Her eyes were round and severe. ‘But it is very early in the morning there. Why she is working now?’

  ‘She had extra duties to do.’

  ‘With the chickens?’

  ‘Erm, yes. With the chickens.’

  She nodded, thoughtfully.

  ‘She told me to tell you that she loves you so much, more than anything in the whole world, and to be really good at school.’

  ‘OK, Mr Yiannis. You be good at work too.’

  Once again, she smiled and she was gone.

  19

  Petra

  T

  HE NEXT DAY, AS I drove home from work, I decided to speak to Yiannis again. As I parked, I noticed the flyer of Nisha just outside the house was no longer on the lamp-post where I had put it. But her smiling face stared at me still further along the street.

  Going through the garden and up the stairs, I knocked for Yiannis. It was the first time I had been in the flat since I had rented it to him. He kept it neat and tidy and so sparsely furnished that it looked as though he was only staying for a couple of days. He kept the patio doors in the living room wide open so that the winter light and wind flooded in. He pulled the doors closed when he saw me shudder, and offered me a hot drink, which I accepted.

  In the kitchen he brewed coffee in a stainless-steel pot on the stove. On the windowsill were two plants: a small cactus and a jasmine flower, whose summer scent reminded me of the old man on the bus to Troodos.

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

  ‘Hm, that’s a hard one.’

  I could almost hear them now: Aliki’s laugh, Nisha’s mock concentration, as she searched out of the window.

  ‘I went to the police,’ Yiannis said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I couldn’t sit around and do nothing.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Basically nothing.’

  He watched the coffee brew on a low flame, making sure that it didn’t boil and spoil the kaimaki – the marbley film of creamy froth on its surface.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know about your affair with Nisha.’

  ‘Affair? Why, who am I cheating on?’

  ‘What would you call it then?’

  ‘I love her. We have a relationship.’

  He said this matter-of-factly, as he poured the coffee into cups and placed them on a heavy oak table, which looked more like a desk than something one might find in a kitchen. One chair was made of the same wood by the same hand, and opposite was a black plastic chair that had nothing to do with the table. I sat down on that one.

  Yiannis took a sip of coffee, glancing at me momentarily over the rim of the cup.

  At this point I heard a chirp and saw a tiny bird beneath the table by his feet, one of those songbirds that sweep in from the west in the winter. I used to hear them over the sea, when I went out with my father in his fishing boat.

  Yiannis reached down so the bird could hop onto his hand. He brought the bird up onto the table and it settled beside the coffee cup.

  ‘That’s an odd choice of pet,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a pet. Its wing was damaged. I’m taking care of it until it’s ready to fly again.’ He was silent for a moment, looking at the bird. Then he said, ‘Do you have any news about Nisha – is that why you’re here?’

  I took the note that Tony had given me, and Nisha’s bracelet, out of my pocket and placed them on the table.

  ‘What are these?’ he said, going very still.

  ‘Two other women are missing.’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘These are their names and the dates when they disappeared.’

  Yiannis stared at me without looking down at the paper.

  ‘And this is Nisha’s bracelet, as I’m sure you recognise. It was a gift from Aliki, and Nisha never took it off. Another maid found it on the street near Maria’s.’

  I could see the fear in his eyes. His hard silence reminded me of Muyia’s wooden sculptures, frozen in time.

  I told Yiannis about going to the Blue Tiger, how I had met Tony and what he had told me about the other two maids. While I was talking, he sat with both hands on the table, a deep frown between his brows. It was only when I finished talking that he moved, bringing his hand up to his face, pressing his temples with his thumb and finger, creasing his face in the way that he had when he’d downed the zivania at my apartment.

  I expected that he would speak but he said nothing at all. We sat there in silence for a long time, Yiannis with his fingers pressed against his temples, me with my hands in my lap. The kitchen window was open a crack and a cold breeze drifted through the jasmine flowers, riffling their smell.

  ‘Aliki, this is too difficult.’

  ‘Keep going!’

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

  ‘That’s very good. But no.’

  ‘Necklace.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neck! ’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nun? ’

  ‘Nisha, where do you see a nun? ’

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

  ‘You see everything.’

  ‘You should be more observant.’

  ‘OK, do you give up? ’

  ‘Let me try one last time . . . nostril! ’

  ‘The answer is Nisha.’

  ‘Me? That’s cheating! I can’t see me! ’

  ‘Why? I see you! ’

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

  ‘Isn’t it funny that you saw everything but yourself ? ’

  ‘Something is really wrong,’ Yiannis said, eventually.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Something is really wrong,’ he repeated, this time more to himself, as he scratched a knot in the wood of the table with his nail. His foot shook intermittently underneath his chair, which made the table tremble and the coffee cups rattle in their saucers. He seemed to be thinking, thinking, thinking. I imagined his mind spinning and I tried to keep mine still.

  ‘At first I thought I might have scared her away,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The night before she went missing, I asked her to marry me.’

  ‘You wanted to marry her?’

  The table stopped trembling. He exhaled deeply and brought his hand up to his face again, this time rubbing his thumb and forefinger towards each other across his eyes, as if he was scooping up tears before they fell.

  ‘I found a ring on her dressing table. So that was from you.’

  He nodded and glanced up at me, as if he was now worried about my reaction.

  I wondered what conversations they may have had: the discussions about Nisha losing her job, just like other maids who had become embroiled in relationships. They were meant to be working and even when they were resting, we owned them. This was the unspoken truth.

  Had his proposal scared her away? Was this a possibility? It would have been simpler and much less frightening to cling to this thought, but the piece of paper in front of us fluttered slightly in the breeze as if it was trying to take flight.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Have a look at these names. Do you recognise them?’

  He picked up the piece of paper and read it. ‘No. She’s never mentioned them to me.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

 
; He nodded. ‘I would have remembered.’

  ‘Mrs Hadjikyriacou told me she saw Nisha the night she went missing, at ten thirty, heading north up towards the buffer zone.’

  ‘That’s the street that leads to Maria’s,’ he said, nodding.

  ‘Yes.’

  He thought for a while. ‘Spyros – the postman – told me he saw her rushing along the street. Apparently she told him that she was going to Maria’s to meet Seraphim.’

  I frowned. ‘Seraphim, your colleague?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I bumped into him at Maria’s on Friday night. I stopped in to leave a flyer and talk to the manager. What connection does Seraphim have with Nisha?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as I know. She’d met him and his wife a few times, that’s all.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘He denied seeing her or arranging to meet her.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Something’s not right there,’ I said.

  Yiannis went into the living room and returned with a handful of red berries, which he placed on the table. The bird ate them one by one. I watched Yiannis as he watched the bird eat. There was a softness to this man; he seemed to have a gentle and troubled soul.

  ‘What about Kumari?’ I said. ‘Won’t she be trying to contact her mother? The girl must be beside herself with worry now, if she hasn’t heard from her.’

  ‘Nisha used to speak to Kumari at my place.’

  I nodded, not knowing what to say, feeling ashamed that I had not known this.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Kumari,’ he continued. ‘I’m trying not to worry her too much until we know more.’

  I nodded again, concerned.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘Kumari knows me. I’ll deal with it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘At least we can agree that she was heading in the direction of Maria’s.’

  ‘Yes. That is one thing, at least.’ But it felt like nothing. ‘Can’t we check her bank account,’ I said, ‘to see if money has been taken from it?’

  ‘It’s not possible to check her account without the police.’

  He offered me another coffee, but I declined. I had left Aliki alone and I needed to make dinner; it would be getting dark soon.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, as I headed to the kitchen door, ‘this guy – Tony – he’s going to call me to arrange a meeting with the employer and the sister of the other missing women. Would you come with me?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, immediately. ‘Thank you, Petra.’

  ‘Thank you, too,’ I said.

  As I walked back down the stairs, my feet were heavy and I felt tears begin to well in my throat. I wasn’t ready to face Aliki yet – I didn’t want her to know I had been crying – so I made my way over to the abandoned rowing boat and got in. Clutching my sweater around me, I sat on the rough wooden plank and thought about the day that Nisha had first arrived from Sri Lanka.

  It was spring, a week after Stephanos had died; I was thirty-two weeks pregnant. I had prayed that he would live to meet our baby. Before his illness, I’d envisioned our future like a storybook: we would have a beautiful garden full of fruit and flowers; Stephanos was going to build a small BBQ out of brick, on the far right by the cactus; we would have two children. We’d made these plans before I even got pregnant. If someone had told me then that soon my only hope would be that my husband would live long enough to see his only child just once, I would never have believed them. We didn’t understand how bad things would get: neither of us had any experience with cancer. We had assumed that things would be tough for a while, and then return to normal. Treatment. Remission. Like so many others.

  Then, one day, I had had to carry my husband to the car. With the help of a neighbour, we lifted him into the seat and we drove in silence to the hospital. My husband’s eyes were yellow and his hands black, and we carried him, twelve months pregnant with bile, over the threshold to no man’s land.

  That Christmas Eve, when he could not lift his arms or his eyelids or his lips to smile, I kissed him. I fed him and brushed his hair and filled the creases around his eyes with cream, then I folded the white sheet beneath his chin and tucked it in around his bones and waited for him to say, ‘I’m here.’

  He lay in his faeces with a catheter and a keepsake from the church, and drank soup through a straw. He had no voice and no hope and no more days left.

  After he was gone, a blur of people came. My mother was still alive in those days and she and my father would turn up together, at any time of the day, with shopping bags and oven-dishes of warm moussaka – which they knew was my favourite. They tried so hard to keep me from sinking. Later, after my mother’s fatal stroke, my father bought a boat and moved to Greece, finding his solace on the sea where he always belonged.

  Friends and neighbours visited. They would ring the door-bell, come and go like ghosts. I had hot food and hot cups of tea. They tried to keep the house tidy. They made sure I ate and bathed and slept. They brought gifts for the baby: yellow gifts – candy yellow, sunshine yellow. Life-before-death yellow. Stephanos and I had chosen the room facing the orange tree for the nursery, so that’s where I stored the gifts in a pile, like a castle, on top of a changing table.

  I drifted through it all, but I was not there. My mind was stuck in the life we had planned; it could not fathom this new reality. All the evidence was that Stephanos was still there. His clothes and military gear were in the wardrobe. His aftershave and cufflinks on the dressing table. His razor by the sink in the bathroom. The canister of his shaving foam still had froth on its tip. His hair was still in the comb. His shoes in the wardrobe. Our bed still held his smell.

  Nisha arrived soon after. She was dropped off by the agent’s representative. She had one small suitcase and copper eyes. She wore a black dress, the material too fine for the cold weather. She stood by the door behind the agency woman, looking around, then her eyes settled on me. The woman – Koula or Voula – wore a grey suit and had a blonde bob and was talking, but I wasn’t really listening. I remember signing the contract on the dining table, while Nisha stood watching by the door.

  ‘You’ve got a good one,’ the woman said. ‘She speaks English. My girl is from Nepal and doesn’t know a word. It’s a nightmare, I’ll tell you.’

  Thankfully, that was the end of the conversation.

  When the woman left, I showed my girl to her room. She put her suitcase down by the bed and asked me if she could open the blinds. For the first time in a long time, the sun came in.

  Dust floated about in the light. I hadn’t been in this room for ages. My girl walked around touching the bedcovers and dressing table and armchair with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘Madam,’ she said, ‘thank you for this beautiful room. You are very kind. Some of my friends said that I might have a dark room and sleeping on the floor.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ I said. ‘We look after our maids here.’

  She nodded.

  ‘When is the baby coming?’ she asked.

  ‘In a few weeks.’

  ‘I have a little girl in Sri Lanka. Her name is Kumari. She is two years of age.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I had no energy and no desire to hear about her life, or anybody else’s, for that matter. There were no questions inside me.

  Her eyes flitted to my stomach and then she glanced again around the room.

  ‘You can have a rest,’ I said, ‘after your long journey. Settle in, unpack, have a good sleep and start work tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, madam.’

  ‘Then you’ll be working from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday to Saturday, with a two-hour break in the afternoon. You’ll have Sundays off. When you’re not working in the evening, I expect you to rest in your room so that you are fresh for work the next day.’

  She nodded and said nothing.

  ‘You have very unusual eyes,’ I said.
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  ‘Thank you, madam. At school my friends called me “mango-eyes”.’ She smiled now, and her face was radiant. I left the room and closed the door behind me.

  From then on, Nisha slowly brought the house back to life. She made me fresh eggs with toast and tea every morning. She cleaned until the marble floors sparkled, the kitchen spotless. On the mantelpiece, the photo of Stephanos stood polished in its silver frame.

  Mostly I stayed out of her way. The baby was due soon, and I was working as much as I could, putting in extra hours at the shop. I came home at night exhausted and falling into bed, barely eating the dinners Nisha would prepare.

  But, one evening, I looked up at Nisha and smiled at her. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’ve done a fantastic job.’

  She nodded and smiled. ‘I’m glad you’re happy, madam,’ she replied. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she went on: ‘But there is something I need your help with.’

  I followed her to the nursery. She had folded all the yellow clothes and put them away, in the drawers and cupboards. She had washed and ironed the bed sheets and throws, and made up the cot.

  ‘It’s very nice, Nisha.’

  ‘But it is not beautiful yet,’ she said.

  On the changing table were ornaments and toys, gifts I barely remembered.

  ‘I wonder, could you help me to decide where these will go?’

  She picked up a snow globe and shook it – white glitter swirled around a cat with four suckling kittens at her teats. ‘Where shall I place this?’

  ‘Anywhere you like.’

  ‘I think it’s the job of the mother to decide.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘On the dressing table.’

  She went over to the dressing table and placed to the left of the mirror. ‘Here?’ she asked.

  ‘That’ll do.’

  ‘Or how about in the middle?’ She pushed the snow globe over a few inches and turned to look at me. I said nothing.

  Then she picked up a string garland for the wall. White fluffy clouds and wooden stars. ‘And this, madam? Over the crib, or on this wall on the other side?’

  ‘Either will be fine.’

  She contemplated for a moment and held them up over the crib and finally decided to place them on the wall adjacent to the patio doors. I watched her as she did it. Concentrating, making sure they all lined up neatly. Then there were fairy lights of moons and stars, a bedside lamp of a cottage where the windows lit up, rainbow building blocks, a family of teddy bears, cactus ornaments, a yellow pillow with the word Dream embroidered on it, and some tiny animals made of felt – a bird, a hedgehog and two bears. She placed each item with purpose and care and soon the room had been transformed. The bedside lamp glowed in the darkening evening light, a beautiful, welcoming little house.