The Bird Market of Paris
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Authors: Nikki Moustaki
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This book is dedicated to my parents, who indulged me in birds.
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“If I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be any birds in cages.”
âIsak Dinesen
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Contents
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I woke one afternoon in New York City, birdless, hungover, a yellow screwdriver on the floor next to my dismantled stereo, a debris field of broken glass strewn across the living room floor, not knowing why my gimlet glasses no longer had stems, or why someone had pulverized my turntable into a mound of splintered plastic. What I did know was that I had given away one of the only friends I had left in the worldâJesse, my African Meyer's parrot.
This was the first moment in my life that I didn't have at least one friend with feathers. Birds had filled my world the way blue filled the sky, with a wholeness so natural that an existence without them seemed a perverse impossibility. But alcohol had superseded birds, and my ability to take care of another living creature had died inside a bottle of Malibu rum.
Until that afternoon, birdsong had been the soundtrack of my life. My parents and I had lived close to my grandparents from the time I was very young, and my grandfather, Poppy, kept birdsâegg-laying Rhode Island Reds, fancy rolling pigeons, gray cockatiels, yellow ducklings, and gleaming pheasants.
I always believed that my affinity for birds was inherited, or at least contagious. In Corfu, at the end of the nineteenth century, Poppy's father had a white cockatoo that sat on the wall in his courtyard and called each family member by name. Poppy's father passed the “bird gene” to Poppy, who, as an adult, sat in an outdoor table at Café Riche in Cairo, beckoning to the Egyptian sparrow merchants who sold the little birds for food. He would buy several cages of the doomed creatures, fifty to a tiny crate, and as dusk fell over Cairo, Poppy and his only child, my father, would set the birds free from the balcony of their apartment. Poppy passed the bird gene to my father, who was responsible for bringing many of Poppy's birds into our world in South Floridaâand for later indulging my bird hobby from beak to tailâeffectively passing the bird gene to me.
Ours is not just a love for birds or an appreciation of them, but a particular empathy for anything feathered. I can look at a bird and know what it needs or wants, and I know that Poppy could, too. He taught me how to hypnotize chickens, how to sneak up on flighty pigeons, and how to handle baby birds. I wouldn't call myself a bird whisperer or a bird psychic, because that's not quite right. It's about reading their subtle cues, about paying attention, a kind of avian super intuition.
After receiving a baby lovebird of my own at eighteen years old, I embarked on a feathered journey using my avian genetic inheritance, which eventually led me to a serious avocation in birdsâbreeding them, rescuing them, and writing about them. That first lovebird taught me what it meant to love a bird, or any creature, unconditionally.
But along the way I discovered alcohol, and it began to consume my life. I was headed toward a featherless existence, leaving that first lovebird and all my other birds behind. While I was at the bottom of my daily martini, Poppy passed away. That loss sent me further into the darkness, into that confused, hungover birdless afternoon, and even further, toward a place without wings.
Until Paris.
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From earliest childhood, I watched Poppy's birds for hours: the Rhode Island Reds and Japanese silkies, green and golden pheasants, peacocks and peahens, duckling chicks in the spring, rolling pigeons and homing pigeons, star finches and zebra finches, peach-faced lovebirds, gray and white cockatiels, and yellow canaries that sang concertos at dawn and dusk. I thought the pheasants weren't birds at all, but aliens. They were too beautiful to be from this world.
Poppy's chickens were affable birds who let me hold them. There's a photo of me at two years old in diapers in the backyard, trying to ride a big Rhode Island Red. Poppy's pigeons were independent creatures who kept themselves one wing-beat out of my reach. The white pigeonsâmy favoritesâcame close when I tossed them the leftovers of our lunch, almost close enough to touch. I'd sit cross-legged in the grass, still as a lighthouse, and wait for them to approach, and then reach out to touch one just as it fluttered from my grasp.
One morning, I discovered a chicken wandering in the yard, long striped feathers trailing from its tail, a gold head and rump, deep blue wings, and a body as red as cherries. Instead of luring it with food or talking softly to it, I chased the fast little bird around the yard for at least half an hour and corralled it into the pigeon coop, wings flapping, honking and wheezing in fear. Flushed and breathless, I ran into the house with the “chicken” clutched to my chest to show Poppy what I had found, so proud of my discovery.
“
Chérie
, you found the new pheasant!” he exclaimed, smiling and clapping his hands. “
Bravo!
”
For each of my childhood birthdays, Poppy bought me a single white dove, a ritual as regular to us as blowing out candles. Sometimes the dove arrived in the early morning, and I'd wake to Poppy standing at my bedside, holding the bird with two hands, like a sandwich; other birthdays, the dove appeared at noon in the backseat of Poppy's 1973 ice-blue Ford Pinto, Poppy having left the house under the guise of purchasing milk, but returning with a small cardboard box instead, air holes punched into the top. I counted the days to each birthday dove, a feathered tick on an invisible calendar marking my growth. Poppy said the dove ensured I'd have peace for another year.
My earliest, most vivid memory of our tradition is the morning of my eighth birthday. I padded across the terrazzo floor in bare feet, past my red-eared slider turtle, Sam, who lived in a Tupperware bowl in the sunny Florida room, past the kitchen smelling of chocolate and yeast, and my grandmother, whom I called Nona, laboring there in the heat on my birthday cake. I swatted open the screen door and found my birthday dove on our patio, perched in a brass cage dangling from a hook on a curved, rusted stand. My birthday dove had baby-fine feathers that looked painted on, a blush-colored beak, and huge, inky, iris-less eyes surrounded by fleshy white rings. I visited the dove all day, poking inside the cage to stroke a wing with the tip of my finger.
At dusk, candles blown out and cake eaten, Poppy fished the dove from the cage and placed its quivering body in my hands. The bird smelled of musky rain and carnations. I cupped its warm body and trekked into the backyard as sunset painted the sky with pinks and violets, the bird vibrating in my palms like a plucked guitar string.
“Where does my birthday dove go?” I asked. I knew the answer, because I asked the question every year.
“She goes to the heavens,
Chérie
,” Poppy said, sweeping his hand over the sky. “And becomes a star to watch over you when I cannot be there myself.”
Wanting to do it right, I launched the dove, arms and hands open in a prayer to the sky, tracing its flight with my eyes until the bird swept into the horizon and out of sight. Its wings whistled as it disappeared, and I felt joy mixed with exhilaration, like
I
was made of bird flight.
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One humid weekend morning a few months later, Poppy asked me to help him outside as he passed the kitchen counter, where I was perched on a stool finishing a breakfast of fried potatoes and a bowl of frozen mangos that I ate like Popsicles, the last treasure from our tree's summer harvest.
“Please put on shoes,
Chérie
. I will eat your toes if I see them.” Poppy disapproved of my perpetual barefootedness. He was full of stories about rusty nails, gangrene, and amputations.
I crunched over the lawn after him with my sneakers untied, over grass growing stiff and brown in the heat, past the three pomegranate trees, to the coop Poppy had built after the last one rotted into a heap of splintered wood and unraveled wire. He wanted me to duck inside the coop and rescue a baby pigeon that had jumped over a wooden partition and into another nest. The displaced baby's parents had stopped feeding it. The coop's door, an Alice-in-Wonderlandish hatch, did not cooperate with Poppy's adult bones.
I squeezed inside. The enclosure smelled like wet wood and pigeon feces. I associated the musty, almost moldy, odor with the birds and had become as fond of it as someone might of blossoming gardenias. The shelf was partitioned into sections, each one large enough for a pigeon sitting on eggs. Each section had a lip on its outer edge so the eggs wouldn't roll out.