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.
I decided to head upstairs and start cleaning the birds. I sat on a stool in the spare room and, one by one, I plucked out their feathers and threw the birds into a large basin. This was a task that took some time, and one that I never looked forward to. It was tedious work I did automatically, and left my hands covered in feathers and sticky blood. Once this task was complete, I would soak them in water or pickle them in vinegar, place them in various sized containers depending on the order, and take them out to restaurants, hotels and venues around the island.
As I held one of the birds in my left hand, about to pluck its feathers with my right, I felt an unexpected vibration on my palm. I paused and looked down and noticed that the soft brown feathers on the bird’s chest rose; its right wing twitched. It suddenly felt heavy on my palm, as if I was holding a paperweight, and the vibration seemed to travel through me – along my arteries, up my arm, until I felt a terrible sensation, a deep tremble in my chest.