I didn’t reply and instead watched Nisha watch the animal, her face bright with curiosity.
There was a flash in her eyes, as if the colours of the forest shone through them, as if some secret energy, some nimble animal hiding amongst the trees, had suddenly come to life. She let go of my hand and took a few steps towards the mouflon. Strangely, it stepped away from the edge of the cliff and came slightly closer. I had never seen one approach a human before. Nisha was so gentle in the way she stretched out her hand, in the way she waited for the animal. But there was tension in her. This was all in her eyes: they burned with an emotion that I didn’t recognise.
In that moment, I felt such a distance from her and the animal, like they shared something I couldn’t understand.
However, in the next moment she turned to kiss me. One soft kiss.
*
Now, dawn in the forest, and the memory of that day brought a sharp pain to my heart. The mouflon ovis gazed at me, transfixed, tilting its head slightly, making a sound which was like a question. A question of a single word.
‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said, and realised suddenly how loud my voice was in the woods, how it disturbed the peace. The Ovis shook its head and took another step back.
‘Sorry,’ I said to it, this time softly.
For the first time, it broke its gaze. It seemed to rest its eyes on the bucket of birds beside me.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I don’t blame you. I’m basically a murderer offering you a peach.’ I laughed a bit, at the irony of it, as if the Ovis might share the joke.
I threw the slice of fruit on the ground, and this time I walked backwards, retreating into the shadows and the trees. I continued to watch the mouflon from there for a while, this incredible animal, strong and beautiful. It was very still, then it looked at something over to the left and turned its back to me and walked away, into the forest.
I removed the rest of the birds from the lime sticks as quickly as I could, so I could return home and find Nisha. I couldn’t wait to tell her what I’d seen. I was hoping that perhaps this story about the mouflon would make her shine again.
4
Petra
I
WOKE UP IN THE MIDDLE of the night because something broke. I heard a crashing noise, loud and clear, like a window smashing or a glass dashed on the floor with force. The sound had come from the garden, I was sure about that. The clock on my bedside cabinet showed 12 a.m. Could it be the wind? But the night was still and apart from the sound I had heard, there was a deep silence. Maybe it had been a cat?
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.