Sunbird

A storm of red dust whirled from one continent to another and delivered the sunbird into my garden. I was wiping the washing line with a cloth to prevent the dust from staining my freshly washed sheets, when I heard mournful, unfamiliar birdsong. I spied a tiny bird perched on an outer branch of the lime tree. Upon its chest was a perfect circle of iridescent red. It took off, hovering in front of the violet-blue red dusted flowers of the morning glory. I watched the bird with the sun on it chest, mesmerised by its sad song, its elegy for Africa as I hung out the washing.

The sunbird was still in my garden that afternoon when it began to rain. Fat, warm, summer raindrops fell almost in slow motion, mixing the remnants of the African dust into a dark, russet paste. The sunbird ventured out from beneath the lime-leaves to the naked end of a twig, stretched out his wings and raised his chest to the rain.

“You were talking in your sleep again, Asja,” said Petar.

He swallowed the last of his coffee and pushed the cup away. I stared out into the garden trying to glimpse the sunbird in the morning light.

“Well, you must be used to it by now.”

Petar folded his newspaper and snapped his briefcase closed.

“Yes, but it is not usual for you to call out another man’s name.”

“Are you jealous,” I teased, “of a dream?”

Petar smiled, but his face was troubled, pensive.

Straightening his collar with one hand I asked, “What was the name of my dream lover?”

“Micha.”

“I promise,” I said, kissing his cheek, “I have no lover called Micha, nor by any other name.”

After the rain of dust and the rain of rain, the summer heat was oppressive. I set a blanket down in a shady corner of the garden and smoked a cigarette as I watched Mario play. The sunbird fluttered down to drink from the honeysuckle that crept along the garden wall. I listened to the sunbird sing and thought about Micha, who was not my lover but my son.

I had dreamt of Micha, of the precious hours after his birth when I was permitted to hold him. I dreamt of his blue eyes and his mop of black hair that was lustrous, not delicate like the hair of my younger brothers and sisters . His father was just a boy, as I was just a girl. My mother arranged for me to give birth in a village to the west, in the house of a distant cousin. The cousin had rosy-red apple cheeks and unkind eyes. She negotiated with a childless couple across the border, a couple, she told me, of wealth, good character and status. My cousin predicted the child’s black hair would rub away within the month.

“Just as well,” she sniffed. “His new mother and father are fair-haired and fair-complexioned.”

The day after I gave up my son, my cousin delivered me to the bus stop in a shiny new car. The car was dark blue and she caressed it with her long bony fingers, as if it were a lover. I touched my belly, feeling the still loose folds of skin there beneath the pretty dress my cousin had given me, and thought that I was just a husk now, a lifeless thing, like the new car my cousin loved so much.

In my next dream, Micha was the age he would be now, a ten-year-old boy kicking a football in a provincial garden. It took a heartbeat for me to recognise the garden was my own, unfamiliar because I was perched high up in the lime tree. Micha had the same dark mop of hair he’d had as an infant. I called out to him, but the sound that escaped from my lips was not my son’s name, but the mournful cry of the sunbird. Micha turned his beautiful face up to the lime tree and smiled a smile of pure delight.

“Mama, Mama.” He reached up towards my branch, his football rolling forgotten on into the weeds.

I called to him, but again the sound was the sunbird’s cry.

“Mama, look at the bird.”

A strange woman stood in my kitchen door, pale gold from head to foot in the late afternoon light.

“Yes, dear,” she said, with the barest glance at me sitting in the tree, her accent jarring to my ears. “Very pretty. Now come inside Ivo, it’s time for your supper.”

The pale woman spat on her thumb and rubbed an imaginary smudge from my son’s brow. I cried out, helplessly.

“It certainly is a noisy bird, dear,” I heard her say, from inside my kitchen.

Petar’s face was pale and fearful in the darkening room.

“Now Asja,” he said, softly, placing his big hands beseechingly on the table, “you must tell me who this Micha is.”

There was nothing I could say to him.

The first yellow buds of winter jasmine replaced the morning glory, the sunbird’s song echoed through our garden every day and Petar took to sleeping in the nursery with Mario, as he could not bear to hear me speak another man’s name in my dreams.

I found myself once again in a dream, shivering high up in the winter- branches of the lime tree. The garden below was white with snow, the sky above heavy with snow not yet fallen. Someone was climbing over the wall. I recognised Micha instantly, although in this dream he was on the cusp of manhood, the barest hint of a beard curled along his jaw. His black hair hung in clumps across his forehead. He stumbled into the snow. I called his name. His clothes were ragged and he was too thin. Slung across his chest was a rifle. He is too old, I thought, to be playing with toys. I fluffed up my feathers and took flight, but found myself in my own form, standing in front of Micha, wearing the blue dress my cousin had given me on the day I gave him up to her.

“Micha.”

Micha flinched. He fumbled with the rifle and pointed it me. I understood then that it was not a toy.

“Micha.”

He did not reply. I heard a woman scream in the distance, and the guttural sound of men laughing. Micha’s hands trembled as he grappled with the barrel of the rifle.

“Micha.”

“Why are you calling me that?” he said, speaking with the same, jangling accent as the pale woman I had seen in my kitchen in another dream. “That is not my name.”

I became aware of other noises – sporadic gunfire, crying, and a single, loud bang that would have reverberated across the city if it had not been for the muffling effect of the snow. Micha’s eyes darted from side to side, his shoulders jerking at every sound.

“You look tired and cold, Micha. Come inside and I will make you some soup to warm you.”

“I shall take whatever I want,” he stammered. “We are victorious.”

My son cringed at another scatter of gunfire and, as he did so, his face transformed into a mask of amazement. He threw his rifle aside and dropped to his knees in the snow, bowing his head.

“Are you an angel?” he whispered.

I looked down at myself then, and saw that my body was not quite substantial and my feet were not quite touching the snow. It seemed that in this dream I was a ghost. Micha crossed himself and pressed his fists against his forehead. I remained motionless, suspended in the frosty, white air as Micha wept.

“I am not an angel. But come inside awhile anyway. I would like to talk to you.”

I felt the bullet pass through me, a second before I heard the report snap across the garden. The bullet entered between my shoulder blades, shattering my spine, grazing the edge of my heart and piercing my diaphragm before exiting from my abdomen. As is sometimes the way with dreams, I experienced no pain, only the icy chill of winter air as it flooded into my body along the path torn by the bullet. I did not bleed because I was a ghost.

Micha grunted and slumped backwards into the snow. Bright crimson unfurled across his chest.

I screamed his name and dropped out of the sky, my feet sinking deep into snow that was no longer white, but pink. “Micha, no!” I knelt beside him, slid one arm beneath his head, held his hand.

“Please,” he said, as bubbles of blood gurgled up onto his tongue, “my name is Ivo. Have you come to take me to heaven?”

“Sshh. Try not to talk.”

His blood was hot; it steamed and melted the snow.

“I want my Mama.”

“I know, Ivo. I know you do.”

The winter air reached around behind my eyes and froze my tears inside me. I stroked Micha’s hair. I kissed his eyelids and forehead. I tried to lift him, but it seemed I had only feathers for arms. Snow fell, and covered his face.

When I woke, the room was too bright because snow had fallen in the night and it reflected the low winter sun back into the room through a chink in the curtains. A wave of dread welled up in me, and I threw off the blankets and ran outside into the garden, barefoot in my nightdress.

“No. Oh, no.”

The sunbird lay frozen on the pristine snow, underneath the lime tree. I scooped the sunbird up in my palms. It was cold and stiff. Its little body had not made even the shallowest of indentations in the snow. I blew my warm breath onto its feathers. I rubbed my thumb on its chest, above the place where I thought its heart would be, but the sunbird was dead. Petar was in the garden, touching my arm, but I shrugged him away.

I lay the sunbird down and scratched snow away with my hands uncovering the hard, winter earth below. I hollowed out a hole in the dirt with my bare fingers, in among the roots of the lime tree. Snowflakes melted on my shoulders.

I buried the sunbird in the cold, foreign ground, covering it over with earth and snow. All the time Petar watched me, and all the time I wept. I wept for the sunbird, I wept for Micha, and I wept for myself.

Author’s Note:

I like to play around with the lengths of my stories. ‘Sunbird’ exists in various versions adapted for performances of 3, 6 and 12 minutes respectively, and several longer versions meant for reading. The effect of constantly adapting and readapting stories to different lengths is interesting. The nuances of the characters ripple in different directions, depending on what I keep back and what I choose to tell. With shorter versions, the audience/reader has to work harder to fill in the gaps and so they own more of the story. There are some constants. Each version starts with red dust and ends with snow. This is the 12-minute performance version of ‘Sunbird’, which was also published in Writers to Watch: Portsmouth Bookfest 2012, An Anthology, ed. Matt Wingett, Life Is Amazing Publishing, 2012.