Songbirds(4)

I put on my slippers and opened the shutters, then the long glass doors to the garden. It was a clear night with a full moon. My house is a three-storey Venetian property in the old part of the city, east of Ledra and Onasagorou, leading to the Green Line that has divided the island since 1974. Sitting in the crystal blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, our small island has long felt the influence of both Europe and the Middle East. We have been occupied by the Ottomans. We have been colonised by the British. And then we became a battleground between the Greeks and the Turks, our population split, until peacekeeping forces stepped in and, literally, drew the line. This partition continues to hold our island in a tentative peace, although missives about reunification are constantly in the news. Our city of Nicosa, on the Greek side, brushes the Green Line right where I live. When I was a little girl, I thought the end of our street reached the end of the world. There is no violence today with our Turkish Cypriot neighbors in the north, but it is an uneasy peace, to be sure.

We live only on the ground floor, each of our bedrooms looking out onto the garden. Two years ago, I rented out the storey above me to a man called Yiannis, who made a living by collecting mushrooms and wild greens from the forests. A bit reclusive, but he was a good tenant, always paid his rent on time. The top floor is empty, or full of ghosts, as my mother used to say, which would make my father scoff at her and respond always with the same words: Ghosts are memories. Nothing more, nothing less.

In the garden, there is boat. There were times in the past, on long nights when I couldn’t sleep, that I would see Nisha sitting out in my father’s tiny fishing boat, The Sea Above the Sky painted in pale blue on its hull. The paint is peeling, and the wood is crumbling. It’s a boat that has made so many journeys. Nisha would sit in it and stare out into the darkness. The boat has one oar – the other has been missing for as long as I can remember – but someone placed an olive tree branch in its place. Because my bed is next to the window, I would watch her for a while through the slits of the shutters, and wonder what was going through her mind, alone like that, in the middle of the night.

But on this night, she wasn’t there. I looked around to try to determine the cause of the crashing noise. I was half expecting the crunch of glass beneath my feet. But there didn’t seem to be anything broken or out of place.

The moon illuminated the pumpkins, the winding jasmine and vines, the cactus and fig tree to the far right, near the glass doors of Aliki’s room, and, in the middle, on a slightly raised patch of earth, where the roots have cracked through the concrete, the orange tree – like a queen on her throne. I always felt, growing up, that this tree quietly commanded the garden.

Everything was so still. Still and quiet. Hardly a leaf moved. I walked around the garden. Near the steps that lead up to Yiannis’s flat, I finally discovered the source of the noise: a ceramic money-box that I’d had since I was a child – it had smashed on the ground, its white shell broken and hundreds of old lira scattered about, making tiny pools of gold.

It was the kind of money-box that you have to break in order to get to the treasure inside. I remembered dropping in the coins, imagining a day when I would retrieve them. My aunt Kalomira had made it for me in the village of Lefkara, where she lived with her husband, who used to eat the balls of a goat or the brain and eyes of a lamb with lemon and salt. I had watched her spinning the clay on the wheel. Her husband offered me an eye. I refused. Later, she had painted the pot white and added a funny sketch of a dog. It was ready for me and waiting on a shelf when I returned with my mother to see her many weeks later.

I had never broken it; the time was never right. So, I had left the coins safely inside, like wishes or secret dreams collected from childhood.

But who had broken it now? How had it fallen from the garden table?

I decided to go back to bed and ask Nisha to deal with it in the morning.

I pulled the covers over me and in the dark and quiet of my room, I remembered my mother by my side.

‘What will you do with all that money?’ she had asked.

‘I will buy wings!’

‘Like the wings of a bird.’

‘No, more like the wings of a firefly. They will be transparent and when I wear them, I will fly around the garden at night and glow in the dark.’

She had laughed and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You will be beautiful as always.’

The memory faded and I suddenly felt a deep pang of guilt for the absence of words and dreams and laughter with my own daughter. How had I lost her?

Or had she lost me?





5

Yiannis

W

HEN I GOT BACK FROM hunting it was still early afternoon. I couldn’t wait to tell Nisha about the mouflon ovis I’d seen in the woods. I wanted to describe its incredible beauty, how unusual its golden fur had been and how, oddly, it had had the eyes of a lion.

The more I said these things in my head, however, the crazier they sounded. I knew that Nisha would listen to me. She would look at me like I was bat-shit crazy, humour me with that slow nod of her head, but she would also suggest we return later that afternoon so that she could see it for herself.

I knocked on the glass doors of her bedroom and waited. I usually heard her flip-flops on the marble floor, but this time there was silence. I knocked again and waited a few minutes, then again and waited a further five. Maybe she had walked down to the grocery store, or she could have gone to the church. Although she wasn’t Christian, she liked to light a candle and appreciate the peace and quiet. In church there were no demands of her, no tuts, no shaking heads. Nobody disturbed her. The locals just saw a good Christian woman praying amongst other good Christians. In there, she’d said, everyone was equal as long as you were one of them.