Nisha felt her baby’s tiny fingers, soft and warm as she slept; she gently squeezed her chubby thighs and placed her little feet in the palms of her hands and held them. Kumari sighed but did not move and did not wake. Nisha inhaled her sweet breath. Then she exhaled her decision. ‘Yes,’ she said out loud. Yes. I must sacrifice these beautiful moments for Kumari’s future. And then she kissed Kumari’s hands a hundred times while she slept and resolved to give her everything she could, every chance in life.
It took more than a year before her plans came into fruition, but eventually Nisha had found an agent, had filled out all the relevant paperwork and when all that was done, which took a few months in itself, she waited patiently for a suitable placement.
There had been a few opportunities that fell through – one with a large family in Singapore, another with an old man in a village in Saudi Arabia, another with a young couple in a town in Cyprus. Then came Petra: a pregnant business woman who wanted help keeping the house and looking after her baby once it arrived. Nisha felt that this was perfect for her – not that she really had a choice. She would have to take what was offered or else she would have to wait longer. The island of Cyprus seemed small and homely, and she had been told that there were many women from Sri Lanka who had already made their way there, and that everyone spoke English, and that the weather was good.
The agent’s fee was astronomical to Nisha, the equivalent of 10,000 euros. Of course, she couldn’t afford to pay it upfront, so she would pay the debt in instalments, commencing with her first pay-check. She calculated that this would still leave her enough money to send home, and to also put aside for Kumari’s education.
Meanwhile, Kumari would no longer settle on Nisha’s chest when she returned from work. She would writhe and mutter and claw at her skin, then cry inconsolably, as if it was herself she had hurt. Nisha was convinced that Kumari understood on some instinctive level that her mother’s heart and mind were somewhere else. Nisha couldn’t bear it. She knew that Kumari knew. Kumari grew each day and became a force to be reckoned with. The muttering turned to actual words. ‘No!’ she would say to her grandmother when she didn’t want to sleep, and ‘No!’ she would say to her mother when Nisha wanted a hug and a kiss on her return from work. By the time she was two and could string sentences together, there was no arguing with her. ‘No, Amma! You go back to work now!’
‘But you were waiting for me all this time, and now you don’t want me?’
‘No. Not waiting. Kumari playing with Ziya. Ziya hungry.’ Ziya was Kumari’s favourite doll that her grandmother had made with old rags.
Kumari watched Nisha as she packed.
‘Big bag, Amma?’
‘I’m putting my clothes in, ba-baa.’
‘Why?’
‘Amma is going away.’
‘Kumari going?’
‘No.’
‘Ziya going?’
‘No, ba-baa.’
*
Nisha arrived in Cyprus late one Sunday night, with a small suitcase, wearing a black linen dress that a neighbour in Galle had made for her. She was picked up at the airport by the agent’s representative, and taken to an old dark house in an old dark city where a forlorn pregnant woman greeted her with a broken smile and distant eyes.
Isuri had been right about one thing – she was given a lovely bedroom with antique furniture that backed onto a garden full of plants, chickens, a cactus, a fig tree and an orange tree. There was a small fishing boat in this garden, which reminded her of the fishermen in Sri Lanka – those she had seen from her bedroom window – and Nisha knew she had come to the right place.
That night, she was awakened by the sound of crying. She got out of bed and held her ear to the closed door. It was a child, very young, probably around Kumari’s age. It was as clear and present as the darkness. She walked along the corridor, following the sound, and it led her out into the garden through the communal door. There the sound was louder. She thought that it might be a neighbour’s child, but it seemed to have no direction. It was coming from everywhere, or so it seemed to her. She sat in the unused boat in the garden and tried to understand where the crying was coming from. It came from the earth and the trees and the sky. She sat there until she fell asleep and woke at dawn to the sound of a cockerel crowing in the distance. The crying had stopped.
She only had an hour before she needed to begin work, so she decided to start straight away. She cleaned and scrubbed every surface until it shone, until the memory of the night’s disturbance began to fade.
Petra was happy with Nisha’s work. It was the only thing she seemed happy about. She appeared to live in a constant state of despair and she carried her stomach like an object, as if she was carrying the earth.
The following night, when she was tucked up in bed after a long day, Nisha again heard the crying. Once again, she got out of bed and followed the sound out into the garden, through the glass doors in her bedroom. It was a clear night, frosty and cold. Stars in a dome above her. The air was still, no wind, and she listened, alert as a cat, in order to locate the source of the sound. But once more it came from everywhere: from the leaves on the trees, from the branches and bark, even from the roots – it seemed to run like rivers beneath the earth, like the deep song of the trees. Equally, it came from up above, from the fabric of the sky, from the waves and particles that make up our existence; it was carried on the wings of bats and owls, and higher still, much higher, it came from the stars.
*
At this point in her story, Nisha paused. She stopped talking and looked at me right in the eyes, then she ran her hands along my arms as if to clarify my existence, to ground herself in the present.
‘Did you find out where it was coming from?’ I had asked.
But instead of replying she drew her body close to mine, so that there was no space between us; she moulded herself onto my body, she tucked her head into my neck and for the first time since the miscarriage, she had begun to cry.
23
Petra
‘S
O, WHEN DID IT ALL begin?’ I said. ‘You and Nisha? If you don’t mind me asking . . . ?’
Yiannis and I had set off for Limassol. I had the radio on low. It was raining hard, so we drove with the heat on, windows up. We were passing an orchard of orange trees and then a farm. I opened the window a crack and breathed in the cold air; the smell of earth and manure rushed in.
‘Two years ago,’ Yiannis said.
‘When you first moved in?’
‘Yes. Well, that was when we started talking. It took some time after that, to get to know each other.’
I thought he might say more but he was staring into the distance, at a village on a hillside.
‘How did you keep it a secret for so long?’
‘She would come and see me a few nights a week. She’d speak to Kumari at 5 a.m., always on Sundays and Tuesdays, sometimes other nights too, and then leave mine just before 6 a.m. so that she could get back to her room before you woke up.’
I kept my eyes on the road but I could see in my peripheral vision that he was looking at me now, perhaps waiting for my reaction.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘I wish Nisha had told me.’
He didn’t respond to this. I mean, what could he say? I would never have accepted it then. I was too greedy, I needed Nisha for myself – and for Aliki.
I never would have considered her right to her own life.
I was embarrassed and ashamed, because I had been so self-absorbed all these years, and I hadn’t noticed. I wondered – would I have been different if Stephanos had still been alive? Would he have kept me in check? My world had become so narrow it hardly even included our daughter. I had missed so much of Aliki’s life, and it was right in front of me. What had she been showing me that I couldn’t see? What had she been saying all these years that I couldn’t hear?
And then there were the birds. Yiannis bringing thousands of songbirds back to his apartment, selling th
em on the black market, being involved in what I knew to be a highly criminal organisation. Ahead, the sea was agitated by the rain. We were nearly there.
*
Tony was sitting in his glass booth. The atmosphere at the Blue Tiger was different today, perhaps because it was a weekday. There was a Cypriot man behind the counter making sandwiches. A few customers were dotted about at various tables and there was no music blasting from the back hall, no one walking around with trays of food and drink. It was as if the other Blue Tiger had been something I had seen in a dream. But then I spotted Devna, coming out of the kitchen area towards us. This time she had on bright red lipstick. She was wearing a different pair of dark blue jeans with a pink and white checked shirt that revealed a soft cleavage.
‘Madam,’ she said. ‘And sir.’ She nodded at Yiannis. ‘Very nice to see you here again, madam. Mr Tony will be ready in only five minutes. I will bring you both a drink?’
Yiannis shook his head. He looked yellow. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
I asked for a black coffee with no sugar.
Devna went off to fetch the drink while Yiannis and I stood there awkwardly, until Tony lifted his arm and waved us in.
Yiannis shook his hand and introduced himself, simply with his first name. He looked like he was there to close a business deal, with his crisp white shirt and grey twill trousers. He was even more handsome now next to Tony, whose white hair was wild and uncombed, while large sweat marks drenched the material under his armpits. A cigarette smoked on its own in the ashtray.
He shook my hand too and we all sat down. Tony eyed Yiannis and picked up his cigarette, taking a long drag of the stub, a long stem of ash falling to the floor by his feet. He stamped on it as if it might cause a fire and said, ‘So, Yiannis, right? What brings you here today?’
‘Nisha and I are close friends.’
Tony raised his eyebrows. At that moment Devna came in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. She had made one for Yiannis too, and he took it out of courtesy. Tony turned the fan on and the smoky air circulated in the booth.
‘Is that a new pair of jeans, Devna?’ he said, and Devna smiled at him with bright red lips. She placed the plate of biscuits on some paperwork on the desk, winked at me and left.
‘They never learn, these girls,’ he said to us now. ‘Her employer is a middle-aged widower who treats her like a princess. He’s bought her a car, he buys her new clothes every week, he’s now given her a credit card with unlimited funds. So, tell me, why do you think that is?’ He smiled, revealing yellow teeth, but his eyes were attentive and sharp and he fixed his gaze on Yiannis, who shifted in his seat and took a sip of coffee. ‘Anyway, I trust that you are both here because you care about Nisha. I have some rather troubling news.’
Yiannis placed his coffee on the desk and sat upright. I saw that he was gripping his knees with his hands.
‘Since you came to see me, Petra, two more people visited me. One was a Romanian maid, who works on the outskirts of Nicosia. She came here to tell me about a childhood friend of hers, Cristina Maier, also Romanian, who has disappeared with her daughter, Daria, who is five years old. The young girl lived here with her mother. As a Romanian citizen she was able to do so. It turns out that mother and child went missing two months ago. The friend has tried everything to raise the alarm, but her employers and police are not interested. The second is again a woman from Romania, Ana-Maria Lupei with her daughter, Andreea. They were reported missing last Wednesday, exactly a week ago, this time from another town near Nicosia, and again she had her young daughter with her. Her employer, an old veteran, came here with his son to speak to me just yesterday. Apparently, she had popped out one evening to meet a friend. She took her daughter with her – and they didn’t return. The old man was beside himself with worry. He is very fond of them both. He went to the police and found the encounter futile.’ Tony shrugged. ‘In both cases, the women disappeared without warning; in both cases, friend and employer insist that it was out of character, that they left without belongings or passports, and in both cases the police were not interested in pursuing an investigation. The only difference here, however – and what is even more disturbing – is that these two women have disappeared not on their own, but with their daughters.’
Tony was silent now, letting his words sink in. He held his cigarette with his elbow on the table, looking from me to Yiannis and back again.
Yiannis inhaled deeply and his breath came out in fragments. I did not turn to look at him. I couldn’t. Any hope I might have had drained out of me: the disappearances wove together now in a complicated web. It had become so much bigger; something dark and wrong clawing at the edges of the booth.
Tony threw his cigarette butt in the ashtray and lit another. The flick of the lighter was loud, the flame cracked into existence, the smoke travelled around us.
Yiannis suddenly stood up, brought his hand up to his face, brought his palm down over his eyes and mouth.
‘Are you OK, Yiannis?’ I said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t understand.’
‘Clearly,’ Tony said, ‘they must be connected. It’s too much of a coincidence. There has to be one person or a group of people behind this. It’s transpired that one of the women was going out on a date. I have no information about the person she was intending to meet –I’m working on that – but she let one of her friends know before leaving home. This confirms, more so, that the police are wrong. These women did not just decide to run away to the occupied territory in the north. I’m going to go back to the station tomorrow with all the facts I have here before me.’ He placed his hand on the notebook. ‘And I’m not going to leave until they agree to take this seriously.’
Yiannis was still standing, his head bowed as if he was praying. Without saying anything, he sat down again and placed his hands on his knees, as before, except this time the anguish was evident on his face.
‘Do I have your permission to share the information that you’ve given me about Nisha?’ Tony now asked.
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘Do you have anything that you could add?’
There was a pause. Then Yiannis spoke, his voice gaining strength as he did so: ‘We now know,’ he said, ‘that Nisha was heading out to meet a colleague of mine. His name is Seraphim Ioannou. He and I are involved in an illegal network involving poaching. Songbirds, specifically. Nisha had found out and had arranged to meet him. Apparently, she never turned up for the appointment.’
Tony’s eyes turned to slits. He opened the notebook and asked Yiannis to repeat the name. ‘Do you have proof that she was going to meet him?’
‘Yes, Seraphim has confirmed it to me.’
Tony nodded and scribbled down a few more notes. Then he closed the pad, leaned back in his chair, looking now for the first time through the glass at his restaurant that had begun to fill up, considerably.
*
We drove back in complete silence. The sun vanished into the sea as the afternoon turned late. Aliki would be home from school by now. Mrs Hadjikyriacou was collecting her and probably keeping her company with her stories, while Ruba made them something warm and fragrant for supper.
Yiannis stared at the rain ahead beating down on the windscreen and only spoke when I turned into Nicosia.
‘Do you mind if I turn the heating off ?’ he said
‘No, of course not.’
I flicked my eyes towards him and noticed that his neck and face were red. I wanted to ask him what he was thinking but no words escaped my lips.
It has been raining so much that the lake has overflowed. The tunnel of the mineshaft has started filling with water.
The rain has washed away the ants and the maggots from the hare, and the mice have run for shelter. Along its hind legs there are tufts of rain-drenched fur, but mostly the skin has been stripped away. The rain falls onto its open wounds, it falls into the open space where its eye once was, into the open space where its heart once wa
s. A part of the ribcage is visible, like a new moon.
The rain continues to fall into the red water of the lake, it pounds down upon the yellow stone, it slides down the rusty skeleton of the gallows frame and into its deep mineshaft. There, on the surface of that dark water, is the white shimmer of material – drenched linen – wrapped around something unknown. Only a tiny bit is visible, like a small, white mountain rising out of darkness, like the tip of a glowing iceberg.
In the guest house, the man and the woman lie side by side on the double bed: she is on her side, facing the window where the rain streams down; he is reading the news on his phone. Its light illuminates his face. He is young still.
The woman reaches for the brochure on the bedside table and flicks through it.
Let’s go to the red lake tomorrow, she says.
The red lake? he asks, distracted.
Yes, I told you about it. There was a copper mine there once. There is a red lake there now, as red as Mars, and people say it is very strange and beautiful and otherworldly. We can see the gallows frame too. What do you say?
Yes, the man says. Sounds wonderful.
24
Yiannis
S
ERAPHIM PICKED ME UP IN the early hours of Friday morning, while it was still pitch-black out. The streets glistened from the past few days of rain. I had all the gear ready and was waiting for him out front, as usual.
Without a hello: ‘Did you complete the deliveries?’
‘Yes,’ I said, getting into the passenger seat and clicking in my belt, after I had put all the stuff in the back of the van.
Songbirds Page 22
