Songbirds(21)

There is a chapel in this village which is silent and empty, but slightly further away, in Agrokipia the church bells can be heard this morning and every morning. Built by the Hellenic mining company, the church served as a protector of the miners, who risked their lives underground. Far away, across the dividing line, the birds can hear the very distant sound of morning prayer from the mosque.

Somewhere in the middle, amongst the rainfall, the two sounds meet and touch and join in union and fall down upon the hare, washing away the dirt and the hatching maggots, washing away the dried blood, the skin that has cracked open into wounds.





10

Yiannis

F

OR TWO DAYS IT RAINED. It was so bad that water streamed into small rivers along the cobbled streets. At night, the customers at Theo’s reluctantly went inside because nobody could sit beneath the vines in the pouring rain. We can survive the cold – with the warmth of outdoor heaters and clay ovens in the taverns – but the rain, though rare, sends everyone indoors. Even Mrs Hadjikyriacou locked herself away. Even the cats disappeared.

For those two days I stayed in. It took me almost that long to clean all the birds from the hunt with Seraphim, to pull out their feathers and soak them. I had to do it in batches. In the spare room I had three large fridges, industrial size. I checked the orders and separated the birds into containers of various sizes and labelled them, before storing them in the fridges. There were one or two establishments – a hotel and a restaurant in Larnaca – who had requested the birds be pickled, so those I soaked in vinegar.

During these dark days, I tried not to think about Nisha. But it didn’t work – of course it didn’t. The rain pelted down on the window from the gutters, drowning out all other sound, so that I felt my solitude keenly.

Nisha’s absence was even louder than the rain.

Down in the garden, the boat filled with water and looked like it was going to sink, like it was doomed.

*

Nisha loved the rain. She would lie on my bed, near the long glass doors, and watch it coming down. She liked to watch water falling. It reminded her of something, she’d said, though what that thing was, I didn’t know. A secret memory.

When it rained, she wanted me to make her Turkish coffee in a small cup, with some sesame biscuits in a saucer.

‘It’s nice to be served sometimes,’ she said, laughing. How she savoured that coffee, dipping the biscuit in until it became moist and dark.

‘Back home we drink tea and chew betel,’ she would say. Always. A mantra. As if she couldn’t quite allow herself to enjoy the pleasures of one world without being pulled into the other. Her home was always waiting for her. This was the feeling I had and it made me want to touch her, to feel the soft dark skin on her thighs and stomach, to wrap my limbs around her and hold her there. But instead, I would simply sit beside her, sensing that at these times she needed company more than comfort.

‘It’s weird to think,’ she said once, ‘how the British occupied both of our countries. What they took and what they left behind . . .’ and the sentence remained incomplete as Nisha’s sentences often did, so that I had to imagine what might have come after. I guess we both finished her sentences with our own thoughts.

She told me about Nuwara Eliya, up in the hills of central Sri Lanka, far from her hometown of Galle in the south. ‘That’s where most of the English people settled,’ she said, ‘up there – because they liked the cold weather. It’s about fifteen degrees! And they built typical English houses.’ There was a note of disgust in her voice on the word typical, a scrunching of her eyes.

I felt close to her at these times – there was this thing we shared, the British occupation, something we could both understand: tales passed down, culture and land stolen, that insatiable fight for freedom and identity. I imagined these houses built with red brick and slanting roofs and neat front gardens, misplaced amongst the rainforest and blue magpies and jackfruit trees. But then, I had never set foot in the place where Nisha had grown up, never seen the paddy fields that she’d speak of so often.

‘Tiryak is one of the six realms of rebirth in Buddhism,’ she said once, when the rain had just stopped, and she was watching snakes and snails coming out on the street below, the birds re-emerging from the trees. ‘This is when one is reborn as an animal. It makes me wonder . . . imagine being reborn as a snail!’ She had taken a sip of thick black coffee and been thoughtful for a while. ‘When I was a child in Galle, there was a frogmouth owl that visited me at night. It was a female, so lightly spotted and white, about twenty centimetres tall, with a large head and a flattened, hooked bill. In the daytime it must have slept in the forest. Its wings were so soft that it flew silently. One night, on my sister’s eleventh birthday, it came to our bedroom window. After that, it came every night for a week, so I started to leave the window open, and then it would fly in and sit on my sister’s bed. But she wasn’t there. She had already died.’

‘You had a sister?’ I asked. She had never mentioned a sister before.

‘She died when she was ten. She was born with a broken heart. This is what my mother said – that some babies are born with a broken heart because they felt so much sadness in a past life, and they are not ready to live again. She had an operation when she was three, had a scar running down her chest like a beautiful tree branch. Sometimes she got me to draw flowers around it, with my mum’s lip pencil. She wanted the scar to look pretty, like the places in the tropical forest. That’s what she said. One day, she just didn’t wake up.’