Songbirds(44)

In the village there is a guest house: a small, rickety building with brown shutters and whitewashed walls in the back garden of a widow’s home. There have been no guests, though, for many years. Once in a blue moon, someone will call from a distant land and make a booking and the old woman will take down the details in a black notebook she keeps by the phone. Then she will go to great efforts to clean, and fluff up the towels and cushions. She will place fresh tea-bags and honey and sugar on a tray, and lay sugared almonds on the pillows and bake pistachio cakes, which she’ll wrap in cellophane decorated with paper daisies and display on the dressing table. She will sweep the leaves and dust from the patio and leave a tourist brochure by the bed.

It is dark when the phone rings. A young man, calling from a hotel in Beirut, with one of those transatlantic accents she has only ever heard on TV. He is travelling around Europe with his new wife, they will be arriving next week, all being well. The old lady jots down his name and number and date of arrival in the black notebook beneath a doodle of a clown riding a donkey that her granddaughter has drawn.

The nights are getting longer and colder and she goes out to collect the washing from the line. The children across the street have gone in and their maid is out picking apples from the tree in the dark. A breeze blows. Good evening, she says, but her voice is carried away.

Along the path a mist settles and darkness settles too, as there are no houses there to light up the way. Further along, there are only trees and clouds and sky, until the earth becomes jagged and dry and drops down to the red water of the lake, which is as black as the night and as the empty eye socket of the hare glaring up at the sky.





16

Yiannis

O

N SATURDAY, BEFORE DAWN, SERAPHIM picked me up in his van. We drove to the Akrotiri base, an hour and a half away. Our ride was mostly silent: we were sleepy; Seraphim looked like he’d been out late. I was biding my time. I wanted his full attention for our conversation.

This time he’d brought with him four calling birds in two cages: three blackcaps and a blackbird. These caged callers would have been caught and kept in the dark for months so that when they were finally taken out into the light, they would sing their hearts out, unwitting decoys to lure as many birds as possible into the trap.

The cages were in the back of the van with black blankets draped over them. I dozed until we reached the wetland, an area of 150 hectares known for its bird life and protected by various agencies because of it. If we succeeded, it would be a good hunt, but we had to be careful.

With Nisha gone, however, and the memories of her tugging at my insides, I began to feel nauseous at the thought of killing all those birds, imagining them trapped in the mist nets.

They flap and they flap and they try to fly, but the sky has caught them.

I thought of the little bird back home, how it trusted me now.

If Seraphim smelled my apprehension, there’d be trouble, so I pushed these thoughts aside. There had been another arson attack a few days ago: a man named Louis, who had never been suited to hunting. They had set his car on fire, like the man before him, but this time Louis’s teenage son was in there, apparently sneaking a cigarette. The boy had managed to get out, but with a badly burnt arm. It was all over the local news. There was an ongoing investigation, but, of course, Louis wouldn’t let on what he knew. He would never tell the police anything.

I knew Seraphim had been the one to snitch on him. Well, of course he had. He is a weasel, this man: stealthy, sharp-eyed, cunning, shifty, sneaky, scheming. Above all, and this was the most dangerous part, he was loyal to the men in charge. I had met Louis – he came out with us a couple of times. He had still been learning the trade, and we introduced him to some good poaching locations. But then he wanted out, and Seraphim was pissed off – this Louis had been his next prodigy. ‘Best to snitch before they snitch,’ was his motto – he’d said this with a wide grin and narrow eyes. The arson attacks were meant as a warning.

‘You’re even quieter than usual,’ Seraphim finally said. ‘Thinking about Nisha?’

‘Yes.’

I could see the moon in the stretch of water outside the window.

*

Seraphim parked the van and we pulled the mist nets and poles from the back of the van, carrying them across the muddy terrain. We returned for the calling birds. There’s a British military base there and the English are very strict about hunting, regularly searching the area for poachers, so we had to be extra careful. It was unlikely, though not impossible, that someone would be checking so early in the morning – it was 3.30 a.m., and because the land was so flat and open, we would see anyone approaching from quite a distance. If we stayed vigilant, we would not be caught.

Seraphim wore a head-torch and led the way. We put the nets up, securing them to eight-foot poles. Then he turned off the torch and carefully lifted the blankets from the cages. The birds were quiet, as it was still dark out. The blackbird’s feathers were a deep ebony, like the night. I suddenly had the urge to open the door of its cage, to let it free so it could merge with the sky.

We placed their cages on the ground of the shimmering wetlands, just beneath the mist nets that hovered like ghosts above the earth, then we found a secluded spot nearby among some pine trees and rosemary bushes. Seraphim had brought a small gas canister and I took out from my rucksack bread, haloumi and olives. We toasted the food on sticks over a small fire. Shadows from the flames licked over Seraphim’s face.