I stared at him.
‘She says I’m a lonely man who needs a woman in his life.’ He laughed. ‘And besides, she likes to tell me stories.’
‘Stories?’
‘You know, about Kumari and her life back in Sri Lanka. Also about her sister and the owl.’
The owl. I had no idea what he meant about her sister and the owl.
‘I make sculptures of people and animals that leave an impression on me. Nisha has told me so many stories about her life, she has brought me so many oranges and grapes and prickly pears, tomatoes . . . and, let me see . . . oh, eggs and sometimes wild greens. She says I’m too skinny, that I look like a lizard, that I need to keep up my strength if I’m going to capture the beauty and sadness of the world. So, I wanted to do something for her.’ He paused. ‘But what are you doing here?’
‘When was the last time you saw Nisha?’ I said.
‘Oh, I thought you were keeping her busy. Tell her I miss her stories and her oranges, will you? And don’t work her too hard – she’ll do everything to please you, it’s the kind of person she is.’ He smiled and the cold morning light lit up the deep creases of his face.
‘I haven’t seen her for almost three weeks,’ I said.
‘How come? Gone away?’
‘I don’t know.’
His smile vanished.
‘She went out three Sundays ago and never came back.’
‘And you haven’t heard from her?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Well, that’s unusual.’
He sat down on the stool and remained quiet, pulling at his beard. He seemed anxious, agitated even.
‘I thought she was busy,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. So there’s a chance I might never see her again?’
He looked up at me, waiting for an answer that I couldn’t give. There was something childlike about him, as if this question had been living inside him forever, and it had finally emerged from his soul.
‘She’s such a good person,’ he said. ‘Bad things always happen to good people.’
‘We don’t know that anything bad has happened.’
‘Sorry, don’t mind me.’ He stood up, as if waking from a sort of stupor. ‘I tend to think the worst – always have. I am sure she is just fine. At the end of the day there will be a reasonable explanation.’
His words followed me like a shadow as I walked home. I kept my eyes on the road so that I wouldn’t have to look at Nisha’s flyers.
When I got home, the house was empty and hollow. I collapsed onto my bed. I imagined I was inside a seashell. The past echoed in its chamber, a far-away sea, long ago, my father’s voice clear and warm above blue waves: Look at that, Petra, look at that jellyfish, look how luminous it is, look how beautiful! No, don’t reach out to touch it, baby. It will hurt you. Sometimes the most beautiful things can hurt us.
And Stephanos, his laughter. That’s what I could hear – Stephanos laughing about a cake I had baked that was as flat as a Frisbee. We spread jam on it, we ate, we made love. Then Nisha, crying in her room night after night when she first arrived. Me, stopping outside her bedroom door and listening. ‘Can you hear that baby crying?’ Nisha had said one night, leaning out of the window. ‘I can hear a baby crying, as if it is crying for me.’
And Aliki.
Mum.
The word had disappeared. She had swallowed it up inside her. She knew, didn’t she? She knew that I was far away, from the day she was born. I heard it now, that single beautiful word; I heard it inside the hollow shell over the sounds of the sea and my father’s voice and Stephano’s laughter and Nisha’s tears.
I saw it like a jellyfish floating away in the water, and I wanted to reach out and touch it.
Mum.
And that’s when I understood Nisha’s tears. That’s when I finally knew about her pain.
Mum.
*
I woke up to Aliki patting me on the cheek.
‘Mum, Mum, Mum, are you awake? What are you doing home?’
‘Oh, stop now, shush, girl. Do not wake your mother.’ Mrs Hadjikyriacou appeared in the doorway, motioning for Aliki to come out of the room.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m awake.’
I thanked Mrs Hadjikyriacou, letting her get back to Ruba, and suggested to Aliki that we cook together.
‘How about we make moussaka?’
Aliki’s eyes lit up and she nodded. This was her favourite Greek dish too, and she had always loved helping Nisha fry the aubergines and make the béchamel sauce.
*
I was in bed and just about to drift off, when my phone rang. I looked at the clock and my heart dropped. It was eleven o’clock. No one called with good news this late.
‘Is that Petra?’ a male voice said on the other end.
‘Speaking.’
A short silence followed before he said, ‘Petra, this is Tony from the Blue Tiger.’
I sat up in bed. ‘Yes, Tony, hello.’
‘I’m wondering if you might be able to come and see me. I have some information, but this is not a matter I can discuss over the phone. I would prefer to see you face to face.’
I ran a hand through my hair, the better to wake myself up. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I might bring someone with me this time, if that’s OK with you?’
‘As long as you’re certain this person is trustworthy.’
‘He is. Don’t worry about that.’
*
The following morning, I took Aliki to school, and once again called Keti and asked her to cancel my appointments for the day. Back at home, I went straight up the iron stair-case and knocked. It took a while for Yiannis to come to the door. He was unshaven and dishevelled. His stubble had a hint of silver.
‘Did I wake you up?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
In the kitchen, morning light fell through the shutters onto the table, and the bird was hopping amongst the rays. In the middle of this large table was a bowl of water and a handful of seeds.
This time Yiannis put the coffee on the stove without asking, and I sat on the plastic chair. The bird fluttered from the table to the kitchen worktop, close to Yiannis. He put his hand out to protect the bird from the flame and left it there as a barrier.
‘The bird’s even better today,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll set it free soon?’
‘Of course.’ He stirred the coffee gently. Then he opened a jar of karydaki glyko and placed two fresh, whole walnuts, husk, shell and nut, leached and soaked in honey syrup on small plates with tiny silver forks. I hadn’t had one of these for years, and even the smell reminded me of this very flat, many years ago, when my aunt lived here. I suddenly remembered the lime-green curtains that had hung from the wall, embroidered with peacocks and lime trees. What had happened to them?
‘So, you have more news?’ Yiannis said, placing the coffee in front of me and sitting down.
‘I received a call from Tony – the guy I told you about.’
He nodded.
‘Late last night, he called to say he has some information that is troubling.’ I swallowed hard, trying to hide my panic from Yiannis; I thought I would start to cry.
Yiannis sat up, a deep crease forming in his brow.
‘He wouldn’t tell me over the phone. I’m going to see him this afternoon. I thought you would want to come with me.’
‘Of course,’ he said, gently, but I noticed that his fists were clenched and his knuckles were white. He caught my eye. ‘I’m scared,’ he said.
‘What of ?’
But he didn’t reply. We ate the karydaki glyko and drank our coffee in complete silence, while the bird hopped about in the rays of light between us.
‘There’s something else,’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘Kumari, Nisha’s daughter. I’ve been thinking about her. Have you spoken to her again?’
Here he sighed deeply. ‘I have,�
� he said. ‘But I just don’t know what to tell her.’
A taxi drives into the village. It stops outside the widow’s house.
There you go, the driver says, glancing with a yawn out of the window.
The woman in the car double-checks the address on her phone.
It’s coming up to midnight and the widow has been waiting up for them. She comes out onto the patio and raises her thumb. Yes, she says, welcome. This is the right place.
The taxi driver opens the boot and carries two medium-sized cases, one in each hand, up to the front door of the widow’s home.
Round the back, she says. That’s a good lad.
The widow leads the couple through the courtyard to the guesthouse and shows them around. The man picks up a sugared almond from the pillow and sucks it and says it reminds him of something, though he can’t for the life of him remember what.
Tomorrow we will visit the Byzantine Museum and the Museum of Barbarism, the woman says.
They are both equally illuminating, the widow says, before she leaves them alone.
I like the word Barbarism, the woman says to the man. It strips violence of ideologies – leaves it bare, don’t you think?
The other houses in the village are dark by now and so is the road leading out of the village, once the taxi has rumbled away.
Down by the lake, flesh has been removed from the head of the hare, from its abdomen and its hind legs. There are three mice feeding upon it now: one scuttles across the body as if it is running over a small hill.
The sky is dark. Clouds have gathered, thick and heavy, as a storm is brewing.
22
Yiannis
‘Y
IANNIS, MATE. I WANT YOU to go on another hunt this weekend. We’ve had a number of huge orders come through. Christmas parties coming up and all that malarkey. It’s gonna be busy again, like it was last year, remember?’ Seraphim said, over the phone.
I was in the bedroom with the windows closed, shutters down, keeping out the winter and the light, agitating about what news this Tony guy might have about Nisha.
What exactly was Seraphim asking me to remember? How I did everything without questioning it? How I had killed inside me the boy I used to be? How I had lied to Nisha?
I remained silent.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘this time, let’s go to the west coast of Larnaca. You had a great catch there last month. I’ll come with you this time, we’ll be even more productive.’
I remained silent.
‘We’ll go this Friday,’ he continued. ‘I’ll pick you up as usual, at 3 a.m., so be outside waiting, with all the gear.’
I remained silent.
‘I gather you’ve lost your tongue.’
‘I’m just looking at my diary. I still need to do all the deliveries from the last hunt.’
I saw myself in my childhood room, sitting at the oak desk, my father hovering over me. By then, I no longer called him ‘father’: he was He. My father had died in the war. I didn’t know this new man, whose eyes were unfocused. He ranted. He wanted me to study, to get out of the village, to make something of myself. Was that so unreasonable?
Well, I did. Look at me. Didn’t he tell me to chase money at any cost? When he died, he no longer remembered my name. But he walked the same, in the care home, along that green corridor, up and down, hovering over green lino, not knowing who he was or who I was. I guess we can die many deaths.
Seraphim cleared his throat. He’d allowed me the silence, but it had gone on too long.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you on Friday.’
*
I lay in the dark thinking about Nisha, the way she had held on to me in the night, grieving for the lost baby. There are many ways to lose a person, that was something Nisha had taught me. It was then she told me the third story of loss.
After her husband died in the gem mines of Rathnapura, Nisha decided to move back to Galle to stay with her mother, in the house between the sea and the paddy fields, where she had lived as a child. By that time, her father had passed away and her mother had retired and was able look after Kumari while Nisha worked.
She found a job as a street vendor in Galle Face Green – an urban park in the jumbly city by the beach – making kottu. Sometimes there were rallies there and parties, and, back in the old days, horse races that she had attended with her father. Along the green now was a sizzling rainbow of street food. Every day she made the kottu, adding roti, meat, vegetables, egg and a spicy sauce called salna, prepared on a hot plate and chopped and mixed with silver blades.
The man who owned the stall was fat and dark. For the first few weeks, he watched over her, especially during the final step of preparing the dish, where she mashed and chopped all the ingredients together with the blunt metal blades. He wanted to make sure she got the process ‘just right’. Once he was satisfied – ‘This is the fucking best kottu in Galle. I grew up on this stuff and know what’s good’ – he more or less left her to it, and went off to manage his other stalls. He paid her hardly anything, but it was the only job she had been able to find: she’d walked up and down the streets practically begging for work. All day long and late into the evening, she was bathed in aromatic spices, and her sweat and her tears dripped into the food, for she did not, for a single day, stop crying and longing for her husband.
There was a carousel a few stalls down, whose music never ended, and opposite an old woman sold colourful saris. Next to her, a middle-aged man had a cart selling nuclear-orange isso vadai – spicy lentil cakes with prawns – and next to him a young woman who made luminous desserts with shredded coconut wrapped in betel leaf.
The park was ringed with food vendor carts lit by small puddles of electric lights at night. There were colours and smells and sounds everywhere, and Nisha was exhausted. Her mother’s pension was measly, so Nisha was keeping them all afloat. When her husband had been alive, they had worked together to pay the bills, and although it had been tough, at least she had been in it with someone else, with both their wages helping them get by. They had also managed to put a bit aside for Kumari’s education. It was Mahesh’s wish that his daughter would be educated, and be the first in the family to attend university.
Once Nisha left for work, Kumari would cry. In fact, she cried until she turned blue. Her grandmother could do nothing to console her.
‘Your daughter is a crazy genius,’ Nisha’s mother would say to her. ‘She knows too much. I can’t distract her like I could with you. She’s bloody minded. Where did she get this from?’
‘You, Amma!’ Nisha would say, remembering her mother’s obsession with her little sister’s heart all those years ago. Remembering the pendant that Kiyoma had thrown into the river to free herself.
Kumari was always awake when Nisha came home from work. There was nothing Nisha’s mother could do to get her to sleep. She tried everything. She sang to her, she walked her along the beachfront. Nothing – Kumari looked at the waves and laughed. Nisha’s mother changed the songs to prayers, chanting beneath the hush of the trees in the garden. At one point she thought of organising a thovil: ‘Nisha, I’m at my wits’ end. This child of yours is possessed.’ She was joking, of course; Kumari still smiled through it all.
Whenever Nisha came home, whether it was 9 p.m. or 11 p.m. or 1 a.m., Kumari would begin to cry. It seemed to Nisha, on reflection, that these were tears of immense relief. She would pick up her daughter, sit on the bed, and make a little nest by crossing her legs. Kumari would cluck and mutter, while Nisha put her baby to her breast. Kumari would suck vigorously, resting her left hand under Nisha’s breasts, her right hand holding Nisha’s fingers. When Kumari had finished, Nisha would take off her sweat-drenched clothes and lie on her back on the rug with her baby on her chest. She liked lying on the floor, feeling the firm ground beneath her: it made her feel safer, held by the Earth. And then, finally, Kumari would sigh and drift into a soft sleep.
At these times Nisha was happy. This
was when her tears stopped, when she had her baby in her arms. On warm nights she’d lie like that in the garden for more than an hour and think about the world from the womb to the stars. She thought about time and space and existence and how somewhere between birth and the heavens we all exist, and that somewhere out there was her husband’s energy-force either waiting or being reborn.
No matter how much Nisha worked, however, her income was never enough. They had already started eating into the education fund, which left her feeling mortified. Within just a few months, there was nothing left. The three of them were surviving pay-check to pay-check.
One day, the young woman across the street who made coconut sweets with betel leaf, didn’t turn up. She was replaced by an older woman with dappled skin who always wore the same purple sari. For so many months, Nisha had watched Isuri as she delicately wrapped the sweets – dark eyes down, flicking up occasionally to take in the passing crowd. Nisha and Isuri would exchange kottu for sweets, pleasantries for smiles, and eventually grievances for hugs. Isuri wasn’t yet married and was looking for a suitable match and was progressively getting fed up with her life; she could never earn enough to support her ailing father and two much younger sisters.
Nisha and Isuri had become close, and Isuri’s sudden departure had had a profound effect on Nisha. Isuri had been talking about leaving Sri Lanka, hoping to go to Europe and work as a maid. ‘So many women are doing it!’ she told Nisha one morning, with sparkling eyes. ‘I could earn double what I’m earning here in one month! I could send money home and still have enough for myself. I’ll be given nice accommodation and food. And imagine having all that freedom too! Imagine being able to go out, to be free, and not have to answer to anyone. I will be my own woman.’ She had been so excited, and Nisha would never forget how Isuri looked that morning with so much hope in her heart.
At home in the evenings, with Kumari sleeping peacefully on her naked chest, drenched in drying tears, she felt her body begin to ache and her mind spin. How could she ensure that Kumari had a good life? How could she fulfil her husband’s wish and send their daughter to university one day? Staying in Galle was a dead end. She had three mouths to feed and she had to do it all alone. The flour was running out in the cupboard, as was the rice. Her mother had started to ration the portions. Kumari was wearing hand-me-downs from the neighbours – this wouldn’t have been a problem in itself, had Nisha been able to put money aside for Kumari’s education and make sure that she was well fed, but no matter how careful she was, no matter how much overtime she worked or tips she earned, she still could not afford to buy all the food they needed for the week, let alone put money aside for the future.
Songbirds Page 21
