CHRISTY LEFTERI Songbirds. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The new novel from the author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo explores the life of foreign workers on the island of Cyprus.
The day that Nisha vanished, before I even realized she’d gone, I saw in the forest a mouflon ovis. I thought it was odd. These ancient sheep, native to our land, are wild and rare.
Yiannis has come to associate mouflon ovis with Nisha, the young Sri Lankan woman he has fallen in love with. They saw one together when they were walking in the Cyprus mountains on Nisha’s day off, and Nisha had been entranced. Yiannis had watched her face ‘bright with curiosity’, and, amazingly, the animal had stepped towards her as if they shared something Yiannis could not understand. Now, Nisha has vanished and Yiannis, heartbroken, thinks it may have been his fault.
Petra, too, who employs Nisha, is worried. In Nisha’s room, she finds Nisha’s passport, her precious heart-shaped locket containing photographs of Nisha and a young man, a diamond ring, and a lock of hair. ‘That’s my Sri Lankan sister’s hair,’ Petra’s daughter Aliki tells her:
‘Her name is Kumari. She is two years older than me – she’s eleven.’ She stared at me. ‘Did you even know that?’
Petra realises just how little she knows about Nisha, who has lived with her for nine years, caring for Aliki since she was a newborn and Petra had been too numbed by grief over the death of her husband to be a mother to her baby. She knows that Nisha would never leave her most precious possessions behind and, especially, that she would not have left without saying goodbye to Aliki, who loves Nisha and is closer to her than to Petra. At Aliki’s insistence, Petra begins to search for Nisha, asking everyone who knows her if they have seen her or heard from her and, eventually, she tries to report Nisha as a missing person at the local police station.
The officer in charge is dismissive:
I can’t concern myself with these foreign women. I have more important matters to attend to. If she doesn’t return my guess would be that she’s run away to the north. That’s what they do. She’s gone to the Turkish side to find better employment. These women are animals, they follow their instincts. Or the money, more likely.
Petra is shocked. She knows Nisha is not like that and she knows something is wrong.
Yiannis, too, has been trying to find Nisha. He rents the top floor of Petra’s house but they rarely meet, and he and Nisha have kept their relationship secret, because maids are not meant to have boyfriends. But Nisha would visit Yiannis late at night, and around midnight, because of the time difference, she would use his tablet to talk to her own daughter back in Sri Lanka. Nisha also liked to keep the two worlds of her life separate:
Downstairs, at Petra’s, I am nanny to Aliki. But when I come up here – and everyone is asleep and there are no demands on me – I remember who I really am. I can be a real mother to my own daughter.
Slowly we get to know Yiannis, Petra and Nisha. Yiannis had lost his executive position in a bank during the 2008 financial crisis. Now he makes a living by foraging for wild asparagus and mushrooms, but mostly by illegally poaching the small, endangered and protected songbirds for which Cyprus is a rest-stop on their migratory route from Europe to Africa. He catches them in nets from a fishing boat, or on gluey lime sticks, ‘hundreds of them strategically placed in the trees where the birds come to feed’. He bites their necks to kill them humanely, then cleans, plucks and pickles them ready to sell on to distributors who supply bars and restaurants, where diners consider them a delicacy. ‘They are worth more than their weight in gold,’ he says. ‘Usually I make more than 2000 euros for each hanging.’
Yiannis hates this work, and not just because it is dangerous and he is always afraid of being caught. He has promised Nisha that he will stop, but stopping is dangerous, too, because he knows too much about this illegal trade and would be targeted by those who organise it. He was recruited to poaching by an old childhood friend, Seraphim, who usually works with him, but he now suspects that Seraphim may have had something to do with Nisha’s disappearance.
Petra, now that Nisha has vanished, learns to juggle household chores with her work as an optometrist. She has to look after her daughter and they start to get to know each other. Petra’s optometry shop caters for well-to-do customers and her search for Nisha takes her to the home of one of these to talk to the two Sri Lankan maids there who knew Nisha. She sees how this middle-class woman treats her maids like children. They are rarely allowed out of the grounds of the house because the woman and her husband are ‘worried that they will be led astray’. ‘These girls have the attention span of fleas,’ says the woman at one point. It is a common attitude towards foreign maids who come to work on the island.
Soneeya and Binsa, however, know Nisha and are worried that they have not heard from her. Soneeya, too, has found a bracelet Nisha always wore near an old abandoned house: Aliki had inscribed it and given it to Nisha as a birthday present. Soneeya also, hesitantly, tells Petra about the love between Yiannis and Nisha.
Petra puts up missing persons flyers wherever she thinks someone might have seen Nisha, and eventually she learns about Mr Tony, a Cypriot man whose café in Limassol has become a meeting-place for domestic workers on their days off. She arranges to meet him and finds that he, too, is distraught about a young woman he had been helping to escape an abusive employer and who also has gone missing, as has another woman. Later, two more women, both with young daughters, disappear. Petra, Yiannis and Tony all go to the police, but each time the police are uninterested. Only when a body is washed from a disused mine-shaft are they obliged to take action.
Chapters narrated by Yiannis and Petra alternate and we learn about Nisha’s earlier life in Sri Lanka and the reason she left to take a domestic maid’s job in Cyprus. In the course of her search, Petra meets other foreign workers and hears their stories. A few were seduced by social media and dreamed of a rich life, but most have obligations – elderly parents, invalid siblings, families they must support: ‘Tell me. Who will do this if I don’t?’ says one. All of the women are paying off debts to the agents who found them work.
I met so many women that night … One of the girls began to cry … ‘I want to go home, madam,’ was all she said. She didn’t tell me where home was.
‘Can’t you go? Just pack your bags and go.’
Through her tears, she laughed. ‘It’s not as easy as that.’
Interspersed between the two narrations are brief chapters of lyrical beauty:
At night, a bat circles the lake, almost invisible against the water. For a brief moment, the clouds part and the moon catches its large wings, its fragmented flight … On this night the earth and the sky join without a seam. There are white flowers in the fields, hundreds and thousands of them. Had there been a full moon, had there not been thick clouds in the sky, they would glow like stars, and heaven and earth would be mere reflections of each other.
These pages seem irrelevant to the main story, but when a man disturbs the scene they gradually become linked to it. It is as if death and beauty are inextricable – as is suggested, too, by the fate of the songbirds.
In the final pages, we hear from Nisha herself, as another Sri Lankan maid translates the diary Nisha was writing for her daughter:
When I held you as a baby, close to my skin, and looked down into your eyes, I saw everything I loved and everything I feared. Within them I saw the sunset over Sri Prada (there’s another story about this! Keep reading and you’ll find out!) … I also saw your future, this made me afraid.
When I first arrived here, I could hear you crying. You might find it hard to believe but it was you I heard, I know that now … So, I sat in the little boat in the garden and sent you stories and love through the night.
I have so much to tell you. But be patient. Reality and truth need time to unravel.
Songbirds is beautifully constructed, moving and sad. As in her earlier book, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, Christy Lefteri draws the reader into the lives of those she writes about so that you feel their hopes and fears, see things through different eyes, and, perhaps, come to understand why some must leave their countries, cultures, and often families, too, in order to survive; and why others are often blind to their plight. In a note to the reader, Lefteri describes the origin of the book, the research she did, and the way true stories shaped it. Songbirds, she writes:
… is a story about migration and crossing borders. It is about searching for freedom, for a better life, only to find oneself trapped … It is a story about learning to see each and every human being in the same way as we see ourselves.
Christy Lefteri Songbirds Bonnier 2021 PB 384pp $29.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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