Only the Animals (26 page)

At about seven in the evening I would get sleepy, then grumpy. I'd whine, grind my beak, droop my eyelids and try to snuggle against her chest until she took me to my cage and put me to bed in my little fleece bird tent hanging from the cage top. It was the only time I would go willingly into captivity. Then I'd sleep for twelve hours straight. In the morning I'd wait for her to wake up and hold me over the garbage can, then I'd let loose the most enormous birdshit you can imagine.

She loved that such simple things gave me delight, a shot of joy – hairy poppies in a vase, sunshine, a full bath run just for me. I would chortle, sing, chirp, crow and coo with the pleasure of proximity to her, and groom her ears, her thin ponytail, the back of her hands, the arms of her sweaters, hoping to be groomed by her in return: feathers ruffled, tummy rubbed, head scratched, pin feathers soothed.

Then she met Marty.

*   *   *

One of the other teachers had persuaded her to come up to the Friday evening rooftop barbeque – she hadn't been for so long – and she decided to take me up there with her, on her shoulder.

Marty had just arrived in Beirut to teach at the American School. He was around the same age as her, had come for the same reasons. ‘I knew I could sense another New Yorker sending out distress signals from across the crowded roof,' he said to her after making a joke about avoiding the Midwestern types up there, and the Scandinavians too. ‘Like sonar waves emitted by a fellow bat in the darkness,' he said.

‘A
bat!
Is that what you think of me?' she said.

That kind of thing, until they couldn't breathe they were laughing so hard.

She and Marty shared meaningful looks when one of the younger teachers arrived with his Lebanese girlfriend. The girl looked young, about nineteen, and had a plastic noseguard taped to her face and a slight swelling around her eyes. She didn't pay much attention to me on my owner's shoulder.

‘What happened?' Marty said to the girl after introductions. ‘Are you okay?'

The girl smiled and touched the noseguard as if to make sure it was still there. ‘Oh, nothing,' she said. ‘Just a nose job.'

Her boyfriend grinned at Marty. ‘I told her that in America the girls pretend they're sick, or having their appendix out, and disappear for a while. But here, it's a badge of honour.'

My owner cleared her throat and smiled politely at the girl. ‘Have you been watching the Olympics?' she asked.

‘Yes,' the girl said. ‘Today I watched the only Lebanese team that does well at the Olympics. The only one that ever gets gold.'

‘Which one is that?' Marty asked.

‘The shooting team,' the girl said, and brought her hand to her face to touch the noseguard again.

*   *   *

When my owner and Marty went on a date to the National Museum of Beirut she took me along again. There was a video screening of what looked like large blocks of concrete being set with explosives and carefully blown apart. Inside each block, as the dust settled, an ancient Roman statue was revealed. During the civil war, the museum director had hidden these statues by encasing them in concrete. After the war ended, he wasn't sure if the statues would survive having their casements exploded. But they did. My owner and Marty found this very moving.

*   *   *

Months passed, many of them. My owner spent more and more time with Marty; less and less with me.

*   *   *

One evening they took me out with them after dark, when the day's heat had eased. They shared a hookah at one of the outside tables at a café in Solidere, and watched a Saudi woman eating a Big Mac meal, holding her niqab away from her face with one hand, lifting fry by fry out of sight beneath the material with the other. The motion reminded me of an elephant trunking leaves to its mouth. Her husband and young son were seated beside her in normal clothes.

Oh, Beirut gave my owner and Marty too many reasons to get on the old high horse.

She and Marty knew each other well enough by then to share the same hookah
but they kept the plastic cap over the tip, not knowing who'd sucked on it the night before. On the table between them was a bowl of green almonds on ice, and cut watermelon.

‘Why did you and your wife divorce?' she asked him, moving a watermelon pip with her forefinger around the table.

‘When we were first married, all she wanted to do was change me. Change this, change that. Why aren't you this, why aren't you that,' he said.

I could tell she liked his ironic tone. He had long since outgrown wistfulness.

‘Then,' he said, ‘fifteen years later, she turns around and says –You're not the man I married!' He laughed. ‘She says – I don't know who you are anymore!'

That was when she decided to let Marty spend the night.

*   *   *

My owner was watching Marty sleeping beside her, and I knew she was wishing she had his capacity to fall asleep so easily. For her, there was always some anxiety surrounding that surrender: would she be able to do it, would she be able to fall asleep without having to try? She said her mind played cruel tricks on her. As soon as she shut her eyes, her brain took its cue to begin scrolling through the events of the day, spewing out reams of details and images and things she could have done better, or not done at all.

She felt abandoned. It was the same kind of loneliness she'd told me she felt when she swam too far out to sea from the public beach on the Corniche.

She got up and carried me in my cage out onto the balcony. The night was still warm. She lay on the sofa on the balcony in the dark with ice packs beneath her feet, listening to the traffic along the beachfront and looking at the dregs of starlight. She didn't realise she'd left my cage door open and her heart swelled with fright for an instant as she felt the first pincer grip of my toes on her upper arm. She relaxed as I moved up her arm slowly with my rocking sideways gait, claw by claw, then rounded her shoulder and inched towards her neck. Gently – very gently – I took one strand of her long hair in my beak and tucked it behind her ear.

In the morning, she said to Marty that she couldn't do this, they should never have done this, it was not why she had come to Beirut.

*   *   *

A year passed.

You should never take it lightly, life in the East.

*   *   *

One afternoon, as I was falling asleep in the crook of her arm, we heard a deep, distant booming that she would have ignored as thunder had the floor of the apartment not moved beneath her feet.

She couldn't see anything unusual from the balcony, so she turned on the television. Israel had launched its first airstrike.

Her only concern was to find a humidifier to protect my delicate lungs from the smoke and air debris. She put me in my cage, covered it, closed all the windows and ran to a second-hand electronic goods store several blocks away. The humidifier was the size and weight of a small fridge, and men stopped to stare at her on the street as she tried to run with it in her arms. She felt no strain. But it turned out to be useless: the power had been cut.

Four days passed. All the other Americans in the building, including Marty, left Beirut by helicopter for Cyprus. He banged on her door as he passed on the stairwell. When she didn't answer, he assumed she'd already been evacuated.

She and I slept during the day. At night she lit candles and sat beside my cage, ready to stroke me when the windows rattled and the ceiling lamp began to swing. Sometimes we could see a flash as the gunboats in the seaport lobbed shells far overhead, towards the south of the city. With each explosion, I dug my toes into the flesh of her arm until she bled.

A disoriented rooster on the roof of one of the surrounding buildings took to crowing hours before sunrise.

*   *   *

I began to screech for hours on end. I stopped eating, ignored my toys, and bit her to the bone when she tried to take me out of my cage. She watched in despair as I self-mutilated, ripping out my own plumage, plucking myself bare. My feathers accumulated in layers on the floor of my cage.

Eventually she tore herself away from me while I was sleeping and found an internet café where the power was working. Her inbox was black with new messages. Her daughter had written five or six times a day in a rising crescendo of panic. Friends she hadn't heard from in years had written in alarm, offering any form of assistance they could think of, most of it useless. Her ex-husband had emailed for the first time since the divorce, begging her to go to the US embassy to be evacuated. They all said they were sick with worry. They all pleaded with her to come home. She basked in their anxiety, smiled at the computer screen.

*   *   *

She couldn't have known, on the day she took one of the last boat jets to Cyprus, that there would be a ceasefire within a month. That morning, she carried my cage onto the balcony and went back inside, trying to pretend she wasn't packing. I knew what she was doing: wrapping the few shrunken apples and pieces of broccoli she'd hoarded in wax paper, filling a water bottle with leftover seeds, putting my favourite toys into a plastic bag.

Out on the balcony, she found me staring at the sky, my eyelids drooping. I didn't make a sound when she threw a towel over my cage in a furtive movement. She dragged her suitcase with one hand, clutched my cage with the other, and made her way slowly to the pet shop many blocks away. It was dark inside, locked up, display windows emptied. There was no sign of my first owner.

What choice did she have but to hook my cage to the awning overhead and leave as quietly as she could, before I realised I was alone?

 

Acknowledgements

Thanks first and foremost to Teresa Dovey for her beautiful illustrations. Heartfelt thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Charles Buchan for their unwavering support over many years (and for not reporting me to the madhouse when I sent them a manuscript filled with talking animals). Special thanks to Eric Chinski for his honest feedback many years ago, and for welcoming me to FSG. Thanks to Jeff Seroy, Sarita Varma, Lottchen Shivers and Peng Shepherd at FSG. Thanks to Boria Sax for first sparking my interest in animals in folklore (and for inspiring the book's title). Thanks to Jackie Ko, Anna Funder, Kirsten Tranter, Jonathan Darman, Amelia Lester, Jessica Berenbeim, Porochista Khakpour, Meredith Angelson, Lorrayne Ward, Sophie Gee, Lev Grossman, Natalie Frank, Ram Natarajan, Paul Stopforth, Hisham Matar, Faye Ginsburg, Fred Myers, Karan Mahajan, Rachel Kushner, Abha Dawesar, Sharona Coutts, Valerie Steiker, Dana Kupersmith, Sabra Thorner and Mark Greif for encouragement along the way. Thanks to Lindiwe Dovey, Robert Mayes, Chiara Dovey-Mayes, Ken Dovey, Teresa Dovey, Blake Munting and Gethin Dovey-Munting for constant support and love.

A much earlier version of ‘Red Peter's Little Lady' was published in
Canteen
, issue 5 (2009), and of ‘Psittacophile' in
To Hell with Journals B: East & West
(2007).

A Note on Sources

Given that these stories pay homage to many authors who have written about animals, I am indebted both directly and indirectly to multiple works of literature. Many of the animal narrators intentionally use words, phrases and sentences taken verbatim from the work of other authors. A complete list of these sources can be found at
www.ceridwendovey.com
.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ceridwen Dovey
's debut novel,
Blood Kin
, was published in fifteen countries, short-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and selected for the National Book Foundation's prestigious “5 Under 35” honors list.
The Wall Street Journal
named Dovey one of their “artists to watch.” She studied social anthropology at Harvard and New York University, and now lives with her husband and son in Sydney.
Only the Animals
won the 2014 Readings New Australian Writing Award. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

ALSO BY
CERIDWEN DOVEY

Blood Kin

 

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

The Bones

Soul of Camel

Died 1892, Australia

Pigeons, a Pony, the Tomcat and I

Soul of Cat