Songbirds(11)

As the boats went further out into the water, broadening the distance between us, the mist net stretched out, almost invisibly, just above the sea, between the two boats. The lights of the town became smaller as we drifted further, steering the boats so that the distance between them remained stable and we were running parallel to each other. It took some careful sailing not to tear the nets or let them droop, but I’d had a lot of practice and Vyacheslav had taught me well.

Once we had gone out far enough, Vyacheslav raised his hand in the air and we turned off the engines. The boats bobbed on the soft waves now, and we waited. The horizon was still black.

You were just so beautiful and sweet.

I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up I saw a thousand wings silhouetted against the sky, the sun cracking through the edge of the world. The birds that flew highest missed the net and made it to the shore; the others, the hundreds that skimmed the water or flew a few metres above it – their journeys ended there. They crashed into an invisible barrier, the fine threads of our massive net, and there they would flap, screech and cry. But there they would stay.

Before the sun rose completely, we steered our boats back to shore and the three of us pulled the net out of the water. Some birds were drowned, others were still trying to escape. We lay the net out on the sand and began to remove the birds, one by one. Amongst the blackcaps were robins and redwings, grey and purple herons, honey buzzards, red-footed falcons, goldcrests and some large wintering black gulls.

We threw the dead into the bin bags and the others – the ones that were still moving – we bit into their necks, severing the artery for a quick death, and adding their bodies to the rest. Other birds were still coming in to land on the shore, and tiny sparrows hopped beside us on the sand. A stray cat with bulging eyes came to sniff out what was happening, winding its way between us, head-butting our knees and elbows for attention. Seraphim threw it one of the birds and the cat took it in its jaw and sprinted off.

‘You shouldn’t do that,’ Vyacheslav said, with creased brows. ‘You might as well throw the vermin money.’

‘It’s only one!’ Seraphim laughed. ‘Keep your hair on, as they say in English. Cats are hunters, just like us.’

‘They hunt to survive and they hunt for the sake of it, depending on their circumstances,’ I said. I’d been quiet until that point, and the two men flicked their eyes towards me without much interest and continued with their task. The sky was lightening now and we had to be faster – we had to have all this sorted and cleared before people in the town began to wake up.

On the way home, I wanted to talk to Seraphim more about Nisha’s disappearance, but he was distracted, giddy from our big take of the morning. He was jabbering incessantly about the plans for our next hunt: we would go to the Akrotiri peninsula, a good place to trap – being part of the British military base there, it was largely undeveloped. We would take lime sticks and mist nets to the Akrotiri marsh reserve and to the pools behind Lady’s Mile beach. We would need quite a lot of lime sticks, so he was going to prepare them in advance.

It was Seraphim who kept our small organisation running, and above him were men who gave him orders. We had the bags of birds with us in the back: Seraphim and I would take a few bags each, clean them, and then give Vyacheslav a cut of the profit. Vyacheslav was exempt from cleaning the birds because the boats belonged to him. We would each make about 3,000 euros from the morning’s efforts.

As I got out of the van, I paused with the passenger door open. ‘Sunday,’ I said to him. ‘Nisha disappeared on Sunday. Was there anything particular about that day? Do you remember anything?’

‘No, why would I?’ he said.

‘Because earlier you said it wasn’t possible. That Nisha wouldn’t have run away. What did you mean by that?’

‘I think you misheard me, my friend. You know what these women are like – they come and go like the rain.’

Not Nisha, I was going to say. But I didn’t.

*

When I got home, I brought the bags of birds upstairs and placed them in the spare room. I proceeded to the kitchen to check on the little bird. It was sleeping. I stroked its feathers. I imagined that birds have no memory, that they live only in the present, that the past washes away behind them and disappears like each wave on the ocean.

I thought of the bags of dead birds in the spare room. I had no energy to clean them, so I stored them in the industrial-sized fridge, and I decided to leave the job for the next day.

I had a long nap as I hadn’t slept the night before. When I got up, it was already dark. I rang Nisha a few more times. Again, it went straight to voicemail. I made myself some dinner of couscous and snails and sat out on the balcony to eat, the throw that Nisha always used over my shoulders. The blanket smelled of her – wood polish and bleach, spices and milk. She felt so far away. Where had she gone? What had Seraphim meant? Did he know something? You never knew with him.

Seraphim is the son of an old family friend. When I was a kid, he would come with his parents and sister to visit a couple of times a year. Being two years older than me, he either ignored me or bossed me around. Then our families drifted apart, and I went off to university in Athens. When I returned, I moved to the heart of the city centre. Years later, after I lost my job at Laiki and started renting the flat above Petra’s, I bumped into him again in the grocery store down the road. He recognised me immediately, embracing me, whacking my back with his big hands. He told me about his Jaguar (he collected antique cars), his property (a sprawling villa), and his beautiful Russian wife. It seemed that there should have been a parenthesis there too, but he left it out.