[These notes date back to 2011; since then, so much happened to me involving birds and dragonflies that I now see the incidents below as a thin sliver from a story without end, one that doesn't even belong to me.]
I.
What I have to relate took place in the summer of 2009, sometime in June; but I had dreamt of its essence two years earlier, during the night of the summer solstice.
In the dream I walk into the room of a holy person – my dream journal says “man” at first and indicates, a few lines below, that the person may also have been a woman. She is seated cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a room that contains little other than an abundance of sunshine. Its minimalism reminds me of Japanese aesthetics, and the holy woman is in fact performing something like a tea ceremony.
She invites me to sit with her and begins to explain to me why the world is going so steadily down a slope. She makes me to understand that this is not a natural decline: it is the consequence of a terrible wrong that humankind has recently committed, either during the World War II or a little earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century. “The primary [or primordial, fundamental] paradox of life,” she proclaims, “has been changed absolutely and irretrievably.” Whatever has been done, it has kicked the human world out of its old course; the world has entered a new era that will slowly but surely advance toward utter destruction.
I receive this news in a confused state; I am at the same time mad and incredulous that we in particular, we the people of the twentieth century, could claim such a dark distinction for ourselves, for having managed to produce that last catastrophic drop that made the cup overflow; that we are the ones who delivered the fatal blow to a vast, beautiful being, which had been quietly yet inexorably tending to its wounds and regenerating itself for unthinkable aeons; that we, not humanity in general, put a stop to that.
To better illustrate her point, the holy woman holds out to me a living dragonfly with a torn wing. The creature rests still on my index as if resigned to its fate, while my other hand desperately caresses the air over its slender frame. I dare not touch it directly, afraid not of being bitten, but rather that my well-meaning thick fingers would crush the last speck of life out of the sad thing. Had the world been as it used to be, the woman means to say, one could have found many ways of healing this dragonfly, but none remains now.
I pity myself as much as the dragonfly, for our shared ill-timing in coming into existence. But even as these thoughts cross my mind, a miracle happens: Under the mechanical motion of my finger, the missing wing begins to regenerate itself, as if being re- woven out of threads of air. I look at the face of the holy woman in great surprise, waiting for an explanation about this instant disproval of her gloomy declarations. She simply smiles.
The color, the atmosphere, the very unfolding of the dream fell so clearly beyond any bit of wisdom I could claim for myself that I knew for sure it had been a visitation. I decided to honor it by rewriting it in as beautiful a prose as I could manage. And, true to my habits around such self-imposed tasks, no matter how noble the underlying purpose, I took exactly two years to actually sit down to work.
When I finally did so in May 2009, it occurred to me also to do a quick research on the symbolism of dragonflies around the world, since I could think of nothing off the top of my head. What I found out justified my earlier conviction that the dream was special. I learnt that, while dragonflies are usually regarded as bad omens in the general Western tradition, mainly on account of their powerful bite, they bear quite a different, positive significance among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and both in China and Japan. Among indigenous Americans and Canadians, they symbolize healing and regeneration after a time of hardship. In China and Japan, the association with healing processes runs alongside another, which has to do with martial valor and victory. I had known absolutely nothing of these beliefs at the time of my dreaming, and yet my dream had blended the elements from the two distinct sets of cultures most smoothly: After a tea ceremony, the sage woman uses a dragonfly to show me how things could be made whole again, in the very heart of defeat and despair.
[Note added in 2020: Mind you, I'm a Turkish person who's been living in Canada for nearly nineteen years, and now, thanks to my practice of aikido, a martial art, I also have an increasingly strengthening bond with Japan. I continue to feel justified in attributing to this dream both archetypal and precognitive qualities.] I was proud and, given all these discoveries, quite thrilled about the short final product of my rewriting, which I titled first “Dragonfly” and then, to provide a pleasant surprise at the end of the reading, “The End of the World.” I submitted it, alongside a longer piece, to the literary contest of Eden Mills Writers’ Festival. Soon after, early in June, I went back to Turkey for my annual summertime stay after yet another school year, leaving on Wednesday evening and arriving at Istanbul Thursday afternoon.
II.
It had been barely a week since my arrival, and unlike my other visits before and since, a lot had already happened. That evening was warm and silky, enveloping us with the scent of the lavenders that revel at one edge of my mother’s garden. Mom was inside sitting with my cousin Alev, who came to check on her after the accident, and I was on the phone with my eldest sister Kuğu out in the balcony, which has stairs descending into the garden at the back.
My mother’s garden, no more than five-years-old, is madly lush. During my visits, I take over the daily duty of watering the plants that the sprinklers cannot reach, and each evening I take delight in sensing their life bursting with happiness for the simple meal they get, after a long sizzling day. So they have all grown tall and wide despite the ruthless pruning they get.
Looking down into that plenty of green, white, purple and red, on the narrow stone pathway that encircles the garden in the back of the house, I saw something moving; or rather, I saw a small something lying on the stone and moving its legs. It was too big to be a bug – we do not have any tropical size insects in the urban Turkish landscape - and my first reaction was that of disgust, mixed with pity, overpowered by disgust: I thought it must be a poisoned mouse in its death agony.
That thought was motivated from the fact that a few days earlier, on Saturday, mom and I had found a drowned mouse in the pool, which, for that reason, had to be fully drained, vigorously washed with chemicals and then re-filled, much to my mother’s distress. She and I had also agreed hastily that neither my two sisters nor my nephew should be told about the incident, “Or they would never again dip a toe into that pool” my mother had said wisely. The very next morning, on a rainy Sunday, something else happened.
We had just finished breakfast, and my mother wanted to show me how to switch the pool’s circulation system on and off, before driving out of town for a few hours. We headed to the small room above the garage where the pool’s switch box and circulation motor stand in a permanent muddy puddle. It was no later than nine o’clock and we were both still in our p.j.s, mine green with pink flowers, mom’s light brown with white polka dots.
Water was splashing around with each of our cautious steps on the wet stones paving half of the back yard, all the way down to the steep stairs that lead, first, to that engine room, and then to the garage. Mom was wearing the navy blue crocs she had inherited from my sister Ahu years ago; they were so old and worn, in fact, that all of the small round bumps embossing the sole had been flattened nearly smooth. Still, mom liked to wear them.
At the head of the stairs she told me that the floor was very slippery, that she was slipping, and that I, moving ahead of her, should be careful with my own steps. Just as I reached the door of the engine room she fell down onto the hard steps with a cry that wasn’t too loud. “My back ... my hip ... everything is broken...,” she said, and I said, in a tone that aspired for yet lacked confidence, “No, it’s not.”
Breaking her hip is one of my mother’s two biggest fears, has always been so. In fact, she considers it a herald for the other – unconfessed - one, which is to die. One breaks one’s hip at an advanced age, remains bedridden due to that wound that never heals, and then dies. A fairly logical pair of fears, come to think. Yet, at that moment I couldn’t believe that she was going to be caught by them right before my eyes, so I said no.
I dropped beside her, with my spine contracted, as it were, all the way up to the nape of my neck. I tried to remain calm, afraid to touch her, and I guess I asked her something idiotic like, “Are you hurting too much?” She recovered her senses as quickly as she had fallen, fortunately, and said that the hip was fine but that her left wrist was probably broken. I had seen a broken hand before. I looked at her wrist: it was elongated and slightly twisted, like a wet shirt that has been wrung and then loosened.
“Yes,” I said this time, “it must be broken,” and I don’t know if I started feeling grateful then or much later. I was too dissolved into my fear to form a coherent thought about how much worse that morning could have been. Whereas my mother, after the first shock, was completely clear-headed and unsentimental.
I dashed to the house to bring the phone, my body overtaken by a nervous trembling, and then ran back to her. The phone was new, and I haven’t been back home but for a few days, so I couldn’t properly dial the number. When a male voice answered, I hoped him to be my brother-in-law, the husband of my sister Ahu, but it was the wrong number. I tried again and this time I did reach Ahu and told her what happened. As she was on her way to come and take us to the hospital, we sat on the rain-drenched steps for a little while longer and then got up.
We walked back to the house, and while I ran upstairs to change my clothes and pick something for my mom to wear, she called my aunt, to ask her what hospital would be the best to go to. My aunt turned out to be on a vacation somewhere in the Black Sea coast. Mom cheerfully enquired about the details of the trip and expressed mock-envy for the lovely breakfast that my aunt was apparently having with her friends by the seashore, before mentioning that her wrist was broken and she needed urgently to go to a doctor. It took my aunt a certain while to understand that the accident had happened only half an hour ago and that my mother’s wrist was still dangling helplessly from her arm, still unattended, like a fabric doll that has leaked away some of its sawdust.
III.
To return to that Wednesday evening: I slowly descended the stairs, my eyes fixed on the gray nondescript form writhing on the pathway, the phone still stuck to my right ear, my sister still on the other side of the line listening to my live report. I proceeded very cautiously, since I dreaded the possibility that the creature would suddenly rise and charge at me. At about two meters’ distance I said to Kuğu, “Yes, it is a dying mouse.” I drew a little nearer and finally saw clearly what it was: a baby bird. It had crashed on its back from an invisible nest, its legs pedaling in the air in an ever-slowing motion, its neck horribly twisted into an angle that would have killed any human being, not that the bird itself did not look completely broken, and maybe only a few minutes away from the end of a very short life.
I told my sister I would call her again in half an hour to tell more about the bird, hung up the phone, and pushed the little birdy with my index to make it roll back on its stomach. It did that, so that not only its stomach, but also its painfully thin throbbing neck, its head and its beak of pure bright yellow all stretched flat on a small island of travertine.
As it came into this position, the bird looked straight into my face, which I had brought within five inches of the ground. Its entire body would cover less than half of my palm, its claws were still made only of nearly diaphanous pale pink cartilage and its beak was as dangerous a weapon as any one of my short-clipped finger nails would be. And yet it looked at me with such a firm gaze that I hesitated to touch it again. Before I drew close I could hear it let out a soft chirp in the tempo of a toy running out of battery, but now it was dead quiet, just looking at me and waiting. I finally plucked my courage, lifted it with one hand as gently as I could manage, and placed it in the cupped palm of the other. It could have done nothing to fight me off and now was shivering with what must have been mortal fear, but still it did not make a sound. Soon as I climbed up the stairs back to the balcony, it shat into my hand.
As a child I had tried a couple of times to keep baby birds alive after they had fallen out of their nest, or after some savage cleaning lady had destroyed the nest, and I knew that birds would simply not survive. Once I had five of them in a deep cardboard box, ones with decent appetites, opening their beaks avidly wide every time I touched their soft skulls, but soon that appetite was gone, and I had to watch them all grow silent and die, one after the other. Another time I found a baby sparrow that was much older than those five, fully fledged in fact, and seeming real close to flying, but it too died; I placed it in its box for the night, all healthy and chirpy, I went out for dinner with my parents and my sister, and when I came back home, I found it dead in the box, with clouded eyes and its beak parted as if for a scream I couldn’t hear. I distinctly recall, however, the strange music of death that rung in my ears for a split-second at my first sight of the corpse.
With such experiences, I had no doubts that this little one too was certainly a goner; with which opinion my mom too, soon as she glimpsed into my palm, concurred. All I wanted was to make the birdy comfortable for its premature passage. I tried to warm it in my hands and then give it some water. Drinking out of a container was not within its horizon of possibilities, and when I dipped my finger in water and brought the drop that remained on the tip near its beak, it did nothing. I dipped its beak into a coffee saucer filled with water, and it just lay there passively, as if waiting to drown. Then it somehow took a gulp. That meagre sign of life gave me a greater sense of urgency to provide a luxurious death bed for the birdy. I found a carton cookie box, lined it with paper towels and placed the birdy inside, snugly blanketed by more paper towels. It looked like a man who drained all of his life out in some desert, and yet, it wasn’t dead yet.
Once again I went out into the balcony to call back Kuğu, facing the blue-gray shadows growing larger in every direction, and as I was relating to her my earliest observations about the birdy, I saw a big stray cat stroll nonchalantly on the stone pathway, passing from the exact spot where I had found the birdy no more than ten minutes ago. Had I made my first call to Kuğu only ten minutes later, the birdy was going to be turned around by the cat’s paw, stare quietly into the cat’s eyes like a proud warrior outmatched, and perish in the cat’s jaws, after having smashed against a stone from a high-up nest. A fine fate.
I grabbed some sweet biscuits from the kitchen counter and mashed one in another saucer with a little bit of milk. Thus equipped, I found myself repeating that feeding ritual from all those years back, with the index finger dipped into baby bird food. The birdy opened its beak so wide that I could see quite a way down into its throat, and it did eagerly swallow the food, its dark triangular tongue tickling my fingertip, but after the third portion it lost interest and turned its head away, seeming not satiated, but rather dissatisfied.
This too I knew, but mom reminded me nonetheless: “Their parents feed them with worms and bugs, they need protein,” she said. Proteinwise the only thing I could find in the fridge at that moment was some Hungarian salami. I tried to mash a little slice into the biscuit mixture, but tiny as I could get the salami pieces, they were still far too large for the birdy. “Well,” I thought, “the bird is already leading a highly unnatural life, so this won’t be too much of a transgression.” I chewed up a piece of salami and spit it into the biscuit mash. The birdy tried one or two fingertipfuls of the upgraded mash, and again turned away, this time falling into a slumber that I did not expect it to wake up from. I made sure the box was well covered but aired, and left it on a small table in my bedroom.
That night, my ordinarily deep sleep divided itself into regular intervals, with a few moments of near-wakefulness in between, when I could hear the birdy shift inside the box without a chirp, its claws scratching the carton walls.
At around 6 am I gently opened the box, expecting to find a corpse. The bird was still alive and asleep; it had kicked off all of its paper towel blankets and huddled against one corner with its neck and head sharply twisted up - it now had carton walls to create the illusion of snuggling parents and siblings.
Soon it started chirping, and though I could tell it was hungry, it displayed the same initial interest and subsequent indifference to the breakfast I offered: an egg yolk, hardboiled and mashed with milk. It kept sleeping as long as I didn’t do anything to bother it. At 8:30 Ahu came to join us for breakfast, and I showed her the birdy in the cookie box, with the judgment that I kept pronouncing to myself and others, like a protective charm: that the bird wouldn’t possibly survive.
We settled in the balcony for our morning coffee and began to discuss what sort of bird this could be – we had ruled out common small species like sparrows and swallows on account of its bright yellow beak – and what kind of food would be to the birdy’s liking. At that exact moment, a sparrow perched on the railing facing us, with a huge moth caught in its beak. It waited there a good while, and then flew up to its nest, which was located inside the drain pipe fitted on the ceiling of the smaller balcony on the third floor. Considering where I had found our birdy, this couldn’t possibly have been its nest, no wind could have flung it so far out into the garden; but it was a live and active nest nonetheless, with chicks tirelessly chirping for more food and energetic parents running around to provide it. Here the mother – it’s easy to tell adult male and female sparrows from one another – was gracious enough even to give us a crash course on what exactly would be to our birdy’s palate.
In the afternoon Ahu and I drove up to a vet whose clinic was in Ahu’s neighborhood, leaving the birdy to our mother’s reluctant care. She had developed a quick dislike for the bird, calling it a shrewd thing. The vet was a tall, young, soft-spoken man with blue eyes and an ill-developed brain. He could not enlighten us as to the species of this bird, which is pardonable, since he could not see it himself; but no matter how emphatically we pointed to the size of the bird, using our palms as a unit of measure, mentioning how it could not stand on its feet, how it could barely crawl, how small and weak its wings looked and how it was quite far from knowing how to feed itself, he thought the best food option for our birdy would be bird seeds. We resigned ourselves to a thin faith in his wisdom and bought a package which he conveniently happened to be selling.
When we got home, mom reported that the shrewd thing kept chirping and asking for food, though it couldn’t possibly survive. I anxiously emptied a little bit of the bird seeds into a saucer and tried to mash them, but those tiny things, flax seeds, sesame seeds and other unidentifiable lumps of red and green substance were all rock hard; they wouldn’t even crack against the pressure of the fork, but merely jump around. I dampened my fingertips with water and tried to massage the seeds into some softness. I brought this new meal to the birdy with a lump in my throat. The birdy actually seemed to like it and shoved its gaping beak fiercely over the tip of my index.
At every feeding session I was afraid of making a wrong move and mortally wounding the bird. The inside of its mouth was pink, soft and vulnerable like an oyster, and the bird exercised no restraint in handling it. It seemed as if it would devour my finger whole, if only it could dislocate its beak the way pythons do with their jaws.
I remarked to Ahu that, from the birdy’s perspective, I must have seemed a hideous, well-meaning yet clumsy giant, feeding it disgusting food out of lumberlike claws. A repulsive giant fostermother. Perhaps out of a deep-felt protest against these excessive trials, my birdy most times bore a straight-out pissed-off appearance. Its black eyes protruded with a dull sheen from a malleable gray skull scattered here and there with short whitish threads that would turn into mature feathers in a few weeks’ time. The eyes imparted a sense of sinister belligerence when open, as if here were a miniature bully ready to pick a fight with anyone, of any species and whichever larger proportions. When closed, however, they gave the birdy the looks of an abysmal exhaustion. My little birdy was an old, old man, furious by day, melancholy by night; half a palmful of semi-translucent flesh enveloping a miniscule heart, lungs, liver and intestines that somehow, despite all odds, kept on functioning with clockwork precision.
So thin was its skin, in fact, that I could actually see the embossments produced by the flax seeds traveling upward in its esophagus, when my birdy started throwing them up in convulsive chokes and shudders. Everything the starved bird had gulped down an hour ago burst out of its beak, intact as if they had just come out of the package. I expected the birdy to drop dead any minute now; it was so easy to imagine even a single sharp-edged seed tear the bird’s digestive tract left and right on its way up. The bird distinctly bore the look of blinking stupor that people have after vomiting, but it didn’t die.
It was only then that I got up to do the thing I should have done as soon as I had found the bird: looking up on the internet the proper food to feed it with. I discovered in two minutes that the answer was canned dogfood, that a baby bird would require a feeding session every twenty-five/thirty minutes from sunrise till sundown, that my birdy was indeed a sparrow, and that sparrows would be ready to fly about twenty-one days after hatching. The source of my belated enlightenment was a YouTube video showing the feeding of a day-old sparrow, which allowed me to guess the age of my unfortunate friend as about two-and-a-half days. The video also taught me a trick to increase the birdy’s sense of comfort and security, by folding soft sheets of tissue in the form of a tiny nest. I could tell the birdy liked the idea, from the way it settled in the nest almost instantly. In a minute or so, it turned around a few times and carefully stuck its butt over the edge of the nest, to shit into the paper towel-lined lands of the cookie box. Ahu and I quickly ran to the supermarket and returned with a can of beef-based dogfood. That meal, the first good meal after the loss of its home and family, the birdy devoured with an almost palpable relish.
I kept feeding the birdy every half hour until sundown, at which point it markedly grew quieter, but it didn’t fall asleep instantly. I took the birdy upstairs, fed it one more time and then held it cupped and covered in my palms, waiting to see if it would chirp for food again. By the twenty-fifth minute it seemed sound asleep, and so I gently placed it into a fresh tissue-nest in the cookie box. This was the end of our first full day together.
IV.
It is strange to think in retrospect how quickly I got in tune with the rhythms of birds’ lives. In the morning of the second day my eyes naturally shot open a little before sunrise. The sparrow chicks nested in the drain pipe of the small balcony were already wreaking havoc for their poor overworked parents, each with a hunger grown monstrous overnight, while my birdy was still quiet in its box. Soon after I got up, a soft chirping rose from the box, like a timid sleepy question repeated at regular intervals. I ran downstairs to fetch its food, and by the time I was back with a saucer of dogfood mash, the timidity was fully transformed into an unreasoning demand, in perfect harmony with the choir coming from the balcony. The birdy ate big gulpfuls of its breakfast and looked noticeably more energetic in comparison to the previous day, so that I once again thanked the wisdom of the internet. After breakfast I lay down in bed with the birdy cupped in my palms and we dozed off together for half an hour, until it got hungry again. I fed it again, changed the paper towels in the cookie box and folded yet another tissue nest for the birdy.
The birdy’s shit was an invariably accurate record of whatever it ate, with matching colors. At the time of biscuits and hard-boiled egg yolks mashed in milk, the birdy shat in yellow notes; now with the beef-based dogfood, everything had turned a muddy burgundy. For some reason I never got grossed out by all the shit I had to deal with, whether inside the box or on my hands; maybe the motherly instinct explains part of it, but it was probably also because the birdy’s shit had no stench that I can now recall. It could have been easily mistaken for a thick salad dressing.
We went downstairs together, and while the birdy took another nap, I made myself a cup of coffee and stepped outside to sit at the balcony table, where the previous day, around the same time, Ahu and I had been visited by the sparrow with the moth in its beak. This time a huge dragonfly swooped down from nowhere and perched on my right shoulder with a curt buzz.
I had made the dragonfly in my dream story a bright cobalt blue, on account of a Japanese species that I had seen on the internet while researching in May. This one was a dark rusty orange with four lacy black wings, sitting motionless on my shoulder. I made no move and began to wait for it to fly away, but it just sat there, without flickering a wing. Despite all my exhilaration for the peculiarity of this new visit, my neck and shoulder grew tenser by the minute, since I remembered dragonflies are supposed to have a powerful bite and I was only wearing a cotton nightshirt. We sat frozen together, the dragonfly and I, for a good ten minutes. Then, when I couldn’t take the drumming of my heart against my rib cage any longer, I very slowly rose from my chair and walked up to the railing. A fresh breeze blew over us, and as I gazed blinking at the neighborhood waking under the sunlight, we spent another few minutes together. The world was serene and frightening, full of whispers. Then the dragonfly zipped away, giving me a little start. The two Turkish words for “dragonfly” are “helikopter böceği” and “yusufçuk,” which translate as the “helicopter bug” and “little Joseph.” They are around, but I had no other dragonfly take such a leisurely break on my shoulder, ever before or since.
I felt blessed, enveloped, even cheered by the spirits; I felt like I had been granted a clear insight as to what the times were all about. This was a time for healing; my mother needed me, this birdy needed me, and I was ready to love and nourish them, to help them become whole again. The dragonfly left me with the sensation of having been patted on the back, good girl, the universe approves of this mission...
Mom is never cruel to animals. She hates, unlike my father, to watch documentaries, because she cannot bear to see the antelope getting devoured by the lion. She speaks of the loveliness of calves’ eyes and gaits, she wishes that heartless peasants beating their mules and donkeys to death would get a similar treatment one day. Often, in the cold winter months, she even takes the trouble to feed stray cats and dogs on the roadside with a pap she makes, tossing leftovers with bread crumbs. I believe one of her most traumatizing childhood memories was when, as a little girl, she was given the duty of guarding over a bunch of chicks in the courtyard against a cat. “They placed a staff in my hands,” she tells, “but no matter how hard I hit the cat, it did not retreat; it snatched the chicks away while taking my beating. I just couldn’t save them.” Despite all of this, mom did not allow herself to grow fond of the birdy. I wasn’t much surprised by her attitude, since she habitually refuses to love any animal that we could turn into a pet. She, perhaps not unjustly, worries about being left with the burden of taking care of the creature; but I sometimes think there might have been a quieter, deeper-running instinct in her rejection of the birdy, in the way she always stood clear of its circle.
There was also a touch of jealousy in her; once or twice she remarked, to me and others, that I appeared to be tending to the birdy’s needs far more readily than I tended to hers. That wasn’t quite the case, but, it is to be said, mom would have been a textbook illustration of what is called a difficult patient. She had to be tended to without giving her the impression of doing so, as Ahu, Kuğu and I each took our turns to learn. Otherwise she would feel she was being treated like an invalid and burst into a long-winded rage. However, all these complications aside, mom was the first to admit that the birdy seemed revived on its new diet. And I many times saw her peer into the cookie box with compassion. Though dysfunctional, there was still a kinship between the soft purple-bellied bully scowling from its tissue nest, and my injured angry dearest mother huffing and puffing in the suffocating heat day in, day out; wriggling, from time to time, her swollen purple fingers sticking out of the heavy cast around her left forearm, secretly terrified of discovering signs of gangrene.
As to Ahu, I couldn’t tell on the first day if she liked the birdy as much as I did. She had been my eager partner in the birdy food quest, and had often looked at the birdy with an expectant look on her face, but I don’t think she touched it. On the second day she came over shortly after breakfast, as I was moving about with the birdy sitting on my left palm. Ahu this time looked at me with that telling silence and I offered to let her hold the birdy. Then I realized her reserve until that moment had been the result of too much tenderness, rather than too little of it; she might have also been slightly envious of the connection between me and the birdy. I think so, because after two minutes of watching my birdy nestling just as comfortably in my sister’s palms, I myself grew envious and demanded the birdy back.
Ahu loved the way the birdy chirped in instant protest when, after cupping it between her palms, she dared to remove the blanketing upper hand. She loved also the birdy’s manner of rubbing its beak softly, ever so softly, against the round pink flesh of the lowest segments of her fingers connecting to the palm, where the birdy sat like a fragile sphinx. I loved its tyranny, the way this miniature life form would regulate the movements of all my limbs, as if I were all muscle and the birdy the remote brain, making me tirelessly rush between the cookie box and the fridge and learn to do all sorts of things with a deft single hand.
I took the birdy outside sometimes, thinking it might need the fresh air that its old nest had provided constantly; but the birdy seemed frightened by the touch of the wind and the sun. Every time we walked into the garden, it shivered and shrank to the depths of my tenting hands, to the darkest spot they could yield. For a long while, there was talk about finding a safe place in the garden where the birdy could be left, to be once again nurtured by its real parents, as the internet informed us they would. We even considered using for this purpose a red bird house built by one of my aunts as a housewarming gift for mom. Even though I did not like the idea of parting, I did seek a solution in this direction, knowing that the birdy would be much happier among its own kind, knowing also that we were supposed to go to our summer house in Bodrum in a couple of weeks, and that the transportation of the birdy would pose more than one problem. But try as I did, I couldn’t find a single nook in the garden within my reach, which wasn’t also within the leisurely reach of crows and stray cats looking for a snack.
So the birdy remained under my care, and days began to flit by. Between dawn and dusk, I shapeshifted into a birdwoman, as if pecked by a radioactive sparrow, and fussed over my insatiable chick. My newly acquired avian senses each day taught me things about the lives of other birds which I had never picked before. Each morning, over my first cup of coffee in the balcony, I watched three or four large crows trace intricate trajectories among the houses crowding the valley, soaring up and diving down to strafe chimneys and power lines, followed by a murder of smaller crows breathlessly batting their wings, with only a hint of the adults’ grace in their flight. They were a bunch of novice flyers, siblings and cousins, going about their strength training under adult supervision. Basic flight comes to fledglings by instinct, but someone has to teach them how to find and eat their food. One afternoon I observed two robins come perch over the large wicker umbrella by the pool; before the birdy, this would have been the end of what I saw. Now I could clearly tell that one robin was the parent of the other; though fully fledged and already flying, the young one had yet to strengthen its wings and develop its stamina. For the time being it needed frequent rest stops in their airborne strolls, like the crows. It also needed to figure out how to feed itself. The young one remained perched on the umbrella, while the parent began to weave a busy coming-and-going between the umbrella and everywhere else, each time bringing what I guessed to be living and moving food. It was placing the crawlies right in front of the young one, pecking at one or two itself and coaxing the slow learner to follow suit. Thus I was made to understand that the conventional freedom of birds was not an idea to be invoked without due consideration. I saw how hard they toiled in their fast-beat daily routines, bound by family ties and obligations; how few of their sunlit waking moments were truly carefree.
I went out with Ahu a few times at first, leaving the birdy under mom’s care for a couple of hours; but it was no easy task to keep up with the chick’s hunger, even for someone who did not have a broken wrist. My mind remained locked on the question of whether the chick was getting enough food. Luckily, just around that time mom felt ready to get dressed up and go to places herself, after a ten-day home arrest which she had chosen to endure fully against her busy nature, out of the fear that the wrist would never heal. As that fear began to fade, mom and Ahu embarked on various dolce vita outings of sunshine and urban coolness, while I gladly stayed home with the birdy, this being the ultimate sign and victory of the nurturing instinct. John, my [then] boyfriend, received frequent reports about this new life cooped up with the birdy, and soon set to write us a happy song.
Around that time I was working on the Kafka chapter of my dissertation, with quite a long way to go before the whole torture would come to an end – that happened only two years later. I would sit before my laptop writing with my right hand, while the left hand occupied by the birdy would be nestled up to my chest to provide the chick with additional warmth and, in case it cared for such things, the sound of my heart beat. The slowness of typing was not a problem; it in fact agreed with the speed of my thinking. The only true challenge of this arrangement was to keep a steady eye on the birdy, watching for the signs of the next crap it would take; at least there was always a clear forewarning. My palm counted as the nest whenever the birdy sat in it, and, as I had figured in the previous days, the chick was pre-programmed never to shit into the nest. So, when the time came, it would half stand on its delicate legs with the wings spread wide, and turn around a few times just like a tired dog preparing to sink into its favorite spot on the rug; then it would flatten its head in a forward stretch, while its butt would stick out in the opposite direction, and from the swollen pink rectum a thick stream of burgundy would shoot out, falling in a parabolic trajectory. I was supposed to hold a piece of paper towel wherever the chick’s shit-canon targeted; if I got too absorbed in my writing, the stream would land on my shirt or lap, anywhere other than the palm.
In all our time together, I never felt that the birdy actually liked me. The satisfaction of its basic needs for survival - food, warmth, silence at night, occasional contact with a living body – it demanded indiscriminately from anyone who might be nearby, me, my sister, my mother; it would have kept demanding those things from thin air, until it no longer could. It was not affectionate, never playful, possibly not even capable of distinguishing between me and the other repulsive giants that came when it called. At that stage, it just blindly, violently demanded to live. To the palms, however, whether mine or Ahu’s, it grew quite attached.
One day, I spread a few sheets of newspaper on a large table and placed the birdy on top, just to see if it could take a couple of steps towards my hand. I immediately sensed how much it hated the touch of the newspaper rustling under its translucent claws, and the unyielding hardness of the table underneath. With a single bound it landed right in the middle of my open palm and then remained perfectly still, as if it and the palm were two matching pieces in a three-dimensional puzzle.
That was the first unmistakable sign of growth I observed, and a few others followed. When I had first found it, the birdy could only crawl from one side of the cookie box to the other; now it was able to stand, even perch on my index, though not longer than a minute or so. It was all the more strange that the legs barely carrying the chick’s weight in a still stance should already have the strength to perform a wide leap. Apparently movement had to be acquired first, for survival; stillness was a superior art.
The beak too began to change. While it had been a block of solid yellow at first, now both its ends were splattered with a deep brown tinge that was slowly advancing toward the pointed tip. Were I to take a guess, I would say the birdy’s spirit must have been located in and around the beak in the first days after hatching; its whole force and drive had seemed concentrated in the gaping beak and the pink throat that lined it, in that inexorable gesture of opening that wanted to swallow life in pre-chewed, small yet unending doses. The weakly flapping wings had been, at best, an accessory to the hunger. Slowly, however, more and more of that spirit began to trickle from the head down to the breadth of the wings. At each new feeding session, the birdy began to stretch them wider and beat them stronger, until it became capable of lifting itself almost to the edge of the cookie box. It wasn’t flight yet, but a sort of toddling in the air.
I understand now that, in the clockwork pilgrimage of the first twenty-one days, a sparrow chick traverses the whole depth of matter, through the thickness of food, shit and straining muscle, to cultivate its lightness. A bird’s lightness, its mature spirit, is matter that overcomes itself. My birdy covered about thirteen days of the road with me. Then came the time to go to our summer house.
Like we had suspected, the bus company expressly refused to carry the chick in the cookie box; but a good solution offered itself soon enough. It was decided that mom and I would take the bus to Bodrum as usual, while Ahu and her husband Onur would drive down there with the birdy, after a few days’ visit to Onur’s parents in Karaburun. I pictured the birdy fledge and fly across the salt-scented skies of Bodrum, zigzagging among cascades of bougainvilleas; with a bit of luck, it would make some permanent sparrow friends there and forget all about its traumatizing residence with the humans. Otherwise, Ahu was gladly going to take it in as a pet bird.
Though I spoke to the birdy all the time, it was mostly to say shush and shut up; I cannot recall if I ever told it these plans about its near and distant future. On the day of our parting, Ahu and Onur came to pick the birdy up right after breakfast. They declined to come in for a coffee, since they had a long day of driving ahead. They waited at the door, while I ran to bring the cookie box with the newly fed birdy inside. I peeked in to say a hasty goodbye to my indifferent love, and then they took off in the usual clamor produced by people leaving and people staying behind.
Ahu phoned me several times on the road, with updates about how the birdy was faring in the car, on the ferry, at a roadside restaurant and again in the car. They reached Karaburun late in the evening, exhausted after the day’s dust and blaze.
The next morning Ahu called at around 8 o’clock, weeping, to tell us the birdy was dead.
V.
I sobbed and shook for about forty minutes; sobbed most of all over the secrecy of that death; thinking how, in the dark of the night when everyone was asleep, or maybe just before dawn, my birdy woke up and looked around at the carton walls and the shit-soaked paper towels. It recognized the presence of death, the way animals do with perfect clarity; the resilient miniature mechanism of its organs gave a sudden jolt and stopped, and a cloudy film creeped over the eyes of my birdy, softly, quietly.
Kuğu, trying desperately to console me over the phone, told me that too much crying would bring bad luck over the family. So I stopped crying.
I had a pleasant day, really. I put on my bathing suit and sat on a sun chair by the pool with my computer. I gazed at the flowers, let the sun soak my salty eyelashes, wrote a thesis paragraph or two, read a little, dozed on and off. Life suddenly became what it used to be, what it was supposed to be, without the birdy. No more waking at dawn, no more feeding ritual every twenty-five minutes, no need to worry about how to teach the birdy to eat moths. The space and time occupied by the birdy was, as it were, already flooded, reclaimed by the rest of the world. It was all pleasant, soft and warm, with a tiny black ball moving up and down my throat.
When I told Ahu I was about to finish my essay on the birdy and that I had come to the sad parts, she asked if it couldn’t be written otherwise. I’m not sure if it’s necessary to write it otherwise. I know the world speaks indiscriminately to all - know also what was my silly terrible sin. I fancied myself picking the words, so easily. This morning, April 27, 2011, I got up and wrote these last four paragraphs. Then my eyes felt tired of looking at the computer screen – alright, I also needed to take a dump – so I picked up the volume of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems and went to the bathroom, as my habit is nowadays. This is how the sixth poem I read, for the first time in my life, goes:
On such a night, or such a night,
Would anybody care
If such a little figure
Slipped quiet from its chair –
So quiet – Oh how quiet,
That nobody might know
But that the little figure
Rocked softer – to and fro –
On such a dawn, or such a dawn –
Would anybody sigh
That such a little figure
Too sound asleep did lie
For Chanticleer to wake it - ...
At the dusk of the day my birdy died, I was sitting on a stone bench in the garden, with a cup of bitter, mastic flavored coffee. Before me lay the view of four big houses, two of them still under construction, the depth of the valley covered by more houses, the woods cresting the opposite hill, and a wide stretch of the western horizon where the sea breezes come from. Three large crows came cawing over the roof of one of the finished and inhabited houses, and perched somewhere near the chimney. Then two more joined them. Four more circled around the roof and landed on one sloping side. The sun touched the horizon and began to sink in. Soaring silhouettes against a luminous peach backdrop, two other crows came, three more, one more, two more. In no time a whole murder covered the roof, as if called for an emergency meeting - I couldn’t count their numbers any more. They hopped, shook their wings, pecked at their fleas, cackled, or did nothing, until the late June sun set fully. Then, alone, in groups, or two by two, they flew off the roof as quickly as they came.
Mom’s wrist healed in exactly six weeks, as the doctor had predicted. I won no prize at the Eden Mills Festival in September. Since the birdy died, John left our happy song unfinished. All the chicks in the drain pipe fledged and flew out of the nest, leaving behind a large bed of dried bird shit on the balcony floor.
London,
April 27, 2011
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