Red Doves – the beginning of a novel

A WAKE FOR TONI

(arrival)

It was the olive-picking season, the octopus hunting had begun, the last glimmers of summer were fading, and I certainly wouldn’t have gone back there, only you can’t go back to somewhere you’ve never been. No, I guess I would never have visited that village deep within the island had I not received an unexpected inheritance. It had been a year of blows; my small world, which until then had seemed so solid, was falling apart. Admittedly, that’s maybe only how it seemed in hindsight—despite my standard strategies of denial, a deep anxiety had long been simmering, and there were warnings of tectonic shifts ahead.
Toni’s death hadn’t been a shock, I merely felt a quiet sorrow at the passing of another relative. Even that is going too far, since Toni hadn’t exactly been a close relative, unlike my mother who’d died three months before. You don’t know anything about her, or him, or that island where changes always come to pass. You don’t know anything about who I am even though you do know me, even though for you I have a face that may not be entirely mine, yet still more mine than many others that I’ve seen in countless mirrors. I’m glad that now I also have a voice.
I hadn’t expected anything from Toni, and not just because he wasn’t a real blood relative of mine, much like nothing else about him was real either it seems. Not even his name. He was named after a great god of Antiquity, and changed it to the most ordinary name he could find: Toni, Ant, Tonko, anything would do. But there are people out there who are his blood relatives, in one way or another, and who could have expected an inheritance after his death. There are reasons for which he didn’t choose them, and reasons for which they didn’t insist. Everything was written, notarised, stamped—but I won’t go into the details of the inheritance proceedings which I didn’t attend. I was represented by the same lawyer who helped Toni draft his last uncontested message to the world.
I didn’t go visit him, I wasn’t in contact with him at all. I only remember a few scenes from my childhood, although it’s generally not a period I like to recall. “That means you’re still young”, my mother once commented, swallowing down the shock that visibly washed over her whenever I said something like that. Perhaps she wanted to say that even bad things can turn to good once enough time passes. When I say the words “my childhood”, I picture a wind rose: big gusts could come from any direction, carry me off somewhere, but windbreaks pop up one by one and finally, far too quickly, each direction becomes an impossibility, and I’m left there in my solitude. Nobody promised you would fly, the voices whisper at night, but they couldn’t possibly be right, how could somebody not destined to fly even think about flight, and so persistently?—At least think about it, if nothing else.
Uncle Toni, that’s what I called him as a little girl. I’m sitting in his lap, we’re pretending that I’m driving a cart that’s being pulled by a donkey along a bumpy island track: one pothole after another, and another, and another… I’m laughing, screaming with laughter as I fall into the crevice that suddenly appears between his knees, always somewhat unexpectedly, since his potholes don’t follow a predictable rhythm. Toni’s laughing too and saying, “that’s life, bump, bump… bump!”
He wasn’t my mother’s brother by birth, he was adopted. After all, a family with four daughters needs a male child too. He was the son of a young couple from the neighbouring village, too young to be parents. “What crazy customs”, I said to my mother when I first heard the story. She’d waited until I was very much grown up before telling me, and even then she could barely suppress a sort of discomfort. “That’s our family”, she said in response to my outcry, and it wasn’t clear whether that was an explanation, an expression of indignation, or maybe her resignation to something that couldn’t be changed; or even the reason why facts were accepted without comment. No, Toni hadn’t been my mother’s biological brother, and it was merely a bizarre coincidence that they had died from the same rare illness.
The message was clear and simple: his village home in the heart of the island, the dovecote next to it, the birds and “everything else that comes with it” were to be passed on to me. All of his other property, including part of the house in the seaside town, had been sold off long ago. He’d spent most of the proceeds, and what was left over he’d also left to me, enough to cover the taxes, the lawyer, the minor repairs to the house and a few other expenses. There were no conditions attached to the money he left me, but I was not allowed to sell the house.
“What if I want to sell it?”
“Then it goes straight to the next heir.”
“And can they sell it?”
“They have no restrictions.”
I wondered what mystery lay behind all of this and replied that I would first have to go and see the property, that I couldn’t make a decision just like that about a place I’d never seen. Toni’s lawyer agreed and said I should come to the island as soon as possible, because of the doves.
I don’t think I’d ever been to that mountain village, not even as a little girl when I’d been dragged around on trips that only left me with a memory of being carsick. Untainted by the past, every place can evoke curiosity and daydreams. But not now, in that moment there was no daydreaming, only the thought that I might step outside of my own existence, that terrible inner tension through which I’d experienced my mother’s last days and the months following her death. A brief relief from the grief, or something of that sort.

Oh, what a trip to remember! Only ten people in the passenger lounge and a storm outside. The large, empty ferry calmly ploughed through the waves, and I would go out onto the deck every now and then, quickly returning, wet from the rain and sea spray. If only we never docked anywhere! A few people were playing cards in the lounge, a man was reading a newspaper, and a young woman huddled close to her boyfriend, shivering from the cold. We were all aware of each other, yet comfortably separated, a silent community of adventurers. It felt as if the ship had embraced us all equally and was carrying us, light as feathers, toward an unknown continent. Layers of my past life were peeling off and falling away, drifting off with the waves, letting me become someone new—or they would, were the journey long enough.

I arrive in the small coastal town late at night and sleep in a rented room, having declined the curt offer to stay with relatives. And then, it’s already day, a brilliant morning with puddles lining the waterfront, the last trace of the storm that had carried me to the island. I wander the streets, trying to hold on to the excitement from the ferry, drinking coffee and waiting for Frano to finish work and drive me to the mountain village. I know he’ll ask why I still haven’t started driving again, and I know he won’t like anything I might say in response—what am I even imagining, being alone up there in the village? I’d better not expect him to come every day; he didn’t do that even for Toni.
Frano is my second cousin, and of course, you don’t know anything about him either, nor is there anything worth knowing. I hadn’t heard from him or seen him in years, just like the others. I’ve frankly always been somewhat intimidated by these loud people who claim to know what their God commands and repeat how this or that person did well, how nothing can be achieved without connections and money, and how everything else is just empty talk. I sensed aggression in those words long before I realised they had to do with my mother, with her indifference towards acquiring wealth and property, with her divorce, and her move abroad—perhaps with some events from her youth. The fact that none of them reached out to her during her years of illness, not even at the very end, did nothing to improve my opinion of them. My mother believed she owed them some loyalty; I owed them nothing.
Frano was the first to call me after the probate hearing, which was expedited (because of the doves, the lawyer kept saying), and asked whether I would accept the property because if I didn’t, he was the next in line to inherit it. “It’s a ruin”, he added, “nothing but hassle, no real use”. I told him I’d come and take a look, and he offered to drive me. And so here we were, driving uphill, along a narrow, winding road into the rocky interior. Both island and mountain, yet neither island nor mountain: there’s no sea in this village, the sea is far below, out of sight; and there are no peaks in this mountain, they are farther up, with no road leading to them. An almost deserted cluster of houses, halfway between here and there.
“There’s only three of them left there”, Frano says, “two failed painters and that shepherd with his flocks and dogs who claimed ownership of all the surrounding land, likely with Toni’s help—he was a local official. That shepherd’s even set up a cheese dairy in some ruin.” At some point, the other villagers decided to move to the coast together, so fed up they were with the centuries-old peasant life that they even took their dead with them and made a new cemetery beside their balustrade-fronted gaudy pink homes. Frano doesn’t tell it like that, that’s me translating his words into my own language. Compared to the newer mansions, those are modest pink abodes. “You won’t know what to do with any of it anyway”, he mutters at some point, half to himself.

But it seems that, in the intervening time, when most of the inhabitants had already left but the village wasn’t completely deserted, some people showed up and tried to do various things. Restless Sisyphus-like folk, doomed to failure from the start: brothers who made sails using an old technique, soaking them in unpleasant wax and oil until their workshop caught fire; a weaver with her flock of silk sheep; a stonemason who extracted rocks from the heart of the island—all dying trades. A singer in search of good acoustics and medicinal herbs for her weakening voice. The painter couple, Frida and Pablo, must have been among them. They were the last to arrive—and no, those weren’t their real names. But at the moment I’m recounting, those names didn’t exist for me yet. I’m being driven along the old worn-out road travelled by nobody but us, the day is fading, and I feel this journey is taking much too long.
I’m nauseous from the drive, almost as carsick as when I was a child. Frano goes on about Toni’s death among the doves, giving a detailed account of something no one witnessed. Then come the discouraging words: no, I won’t be comfortable there. No, there’s no water supply—there never was. The cistern? It’s probably in bad shape. The wiring is old. If the fridge works, nothing else does.
“What else? What is there that might not work?”
“Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing there.”
Yet I know there must be something—the house had been inhabited until recently.
Toni distrusted his own family so much that only Jakša, the shepherd, was given a copy of his key. The other key, the one the lawyer used to lock up the house after the coroner’s formalities were over, was with me. Night had already fallen when I unlocked the door, and instead of the damp smell that so often clings to old island houses, I was merely met with an ordinary chill. We brought in my things, and I expected Frano to leave immediately—I wanted him to go and let me face this place alone, with its solitude and a sudden feeling of connection to the space that overcame me as soon as I opened the door. He seemed to be waiting for my decision, right then and there—yes or no, say no so I can activate Plan B! I took a deep breath and bid him goodnight, trying to make it sound like a command.

The house is still the same today: a single room on the ground floor, slightly raised, an attic accessed via an outside staircase, and a backyard enclosed on all sides, resembling a room without a roof. It’s bordered by the wall of the house, a separate bathroom and summer kitchen that Toni built himself using flat stones and no mortar, another wall from some abandoned building, and a partly dilapidated garden partition hiding a small courtyard among the ruins. When I first went out through the back door, I was greeted by the smell of lavender from the other courtyard; but most of that space was taken over not by plants but by a large dovecote. This was the sum of my inheritance: a house with a double courtyard in an abandoned village—a small, seemingly tame beast. There was no danger of it collapsing, they told me, the roof had been repaired four years ago.
The doves were asleep and the moon rose over the village. Everything was fine, I concluded, and retreated inside, leaving the door to the courtyard open, though the cold from the hillside was seeping in with the darkness. It would have been nice if someone had lit a welcoming fire in the old stove, if there were a bowl of soup on its iron rings, if at least the birds were awake… But the bed was unexpectedly comfortable, and the blanket smelled of washed wool and lavender. The island was sinking into deep silence, with only an occasional light gust of wind fluttering between the houses like a shudder.
At that time, my world was still just stone, clay and crystals, silent elements of the Earth. Yet nothing in this world is wholly silent. In the space between wakefulness and sleep, I was suddenly surrounded by murmuring: “Tell me who you are! Tell me who you are!”. “Tell me who you are,” I retorted like an echo, though I knew the answer. These were the voices of the stones, the living stones on which the house stands, from which the village was built. “She doesn’t know who she is”, they muttered, “hiding her face, hiding her name, another one who’s come to hide. She doesn’t know yet, but she will. She doesn’t know her weight; it will be measured here. She doesn’t know her own face; it will reveal itself here—”
A crash cut them short. The water pot I’d left on the stove rolled across the stone tiles. Out of nowhere, a cat landed on my bed.

(doves)

In the morning, everything looked perfectly ordinary: the neglect of my temporary abode was visible—dust, grey ash around the stove, desolate clothes that had lost their owner. A cracked blue basin stuck together with silver tape, rubber slippers, and worn-out shoes that should be taken someplace, though I’m not sure where.
Outside, the world was washed clean by the wind, brimming with colour. The sun shone with renewed vigour and every detail appeared with painful clarity. The spaces inside and outdoors felt overwhelming; I turned away from them and stepped into the aviary.
It was just a large wire cage, partly overgrown with vines, with a few wooden nesting boxes for the birds. But the word “aviary” sounds much nicer, it evokes the idea of flight. And birds are supposed to fly, aren’t they? That was my first thought as I entered their space—but perhaps it’s not so simple, maybe there are rules concerning their flight, just as there must be a reason why Toni kept them in this enclosure. At that moment, I knew nothing about them at all.
Later, I learned quite a bit about doves, lived in daily contact with them, and even dared to write about them occasionally, despite my rule to only write about inanimate nature. Without the doves, there would be no story, and in this very moment, its ending depends on one of them. I often stayed close to these birds in the months that followed, observing them and thinking about them, but the confusion I felt during my first encounter with them never entirely left me: their repulsive otherness, the harshness of their gaze, the incomprehensible force of their small, sudden movements—or was that all just me and my anxiety?
They cautiously backed away from me, even though I had approached slowly. I sat on a stone bench in the aviary and waited. Toni must have often sat on that polished stone; once he sat there for the first time, like I did that morning, with some reason, some plan, at the beginning of a story—or at the end? I waited to see what would happen, what response we might provoke in each other. The birds waited too, until one of them came a little closer.
Do you know that elemental, childlike pleasure of feeding animals and establishing a closeness and feeling like a benevolent deity? Their touching trust and fragility as you spread your large protective wings over them… Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but I spent my first days on the island feeding and observing the doves. It felt as if not only had all the problems of the real world been postponed, but time itself was at a standstill.
Slowly, my eyes began to open to the diversity among these birds that we always call by the same name. Not just the varying feather patterns in shades from white to black, and not just the different intensity of greens and purples on their necks—but also their disparate gazes and movements, their levels of trust and apparent arrogance. I watched them and watched them, and I don’t know at what point I began to view their movements as signs, as an unknown language that needed to be deciphered to resolve other puzzles, perhaps every unanswered question. It’s hard to interpret signs that are constantly shifting and changing. Photographs might help me see things more clearly, I thought, and after an initial hesitation and reluctance to place the device between my eye and the birds, I started taking pictures. I rarely managed to capture the movement I was aiming for; instead, I caught others…
Now, looking back on it, it seems that my time on the island began as a grand retreat into stillness and silence, a great relief that I was allowed this respite for a moment. But the feeling that something might happen and that life would never be the same again never quite fades away.

At the end of the first day, the shepherd Jakša stopped by and asked if I needed anything. I don’t know why, but I had expected an old man; he wasn’t old but lean and sun-darkened—ageless.
“I have nothing for the cat,” I said.
“She can have cream like always, she’ll take care of the rest herself.”
“I didn’t know there were still mice in the village.”
“There are birds,” he said with a wink.
“I’d like to buy some milk for myself too, and cheese if that’s possible.”
“Of course it’s possible. I can also bake some bread for you if you’d like.”
I didn’t tell him anything about myself, sensing that he already knew all that he needed to. Besides, he hadn’t asked me anything.
“Toni was a good man,” he said at the end, in place of a goodbye. “Better than most.”

The remaining two villagers first came to me as a duet. It was evening, and sounds once again formed images on the brink of slumber. Gusts of wind, the patter of small paws in the attic, the creaking of the house, a bird persistently singing in the dark—although it didn’t sound much like a song, more an attempt to express something that couldn’t be precisely uttered, only stated more or less inadequately, over and over. Two human voices were woven into this tapestry of sound, at first barely audible. They came with the wind, in surges, bursting out and then fading away. When you strain to hear something, it feels like your ears are growing from the effort of listening, like the world is getting louder and louder—do you know that sensation? I listened and heard more clearly: a woman’s voice would begin a song and the man’s voice would join in, soaring above it before fading off… I couldn’t recognise the melodies.
Then the others joined in, voices from the fringes. “Look at her, look how many pictures she’s taken, but she doesn’t know what to do with them!” The windows and doors of abandoned houses were opening around me, wheels turned joyfully, across the narrow street slid clotheslines on which hung my photographs of doves, now as large as banners. I climbed a path of smooth uneven stones, suddenly becoming weightless, as fragmented movements of birds assembled above the former street, on the verge of forming a thought, a message… a blow: the wind began to pound against my window just as it seemed that a sharp and supernatural clarity was about to take over the world. The man and woman were still singing in the distance. They seemed to have sung all night.
The next morning, I set the birds free.

A few days later, Marisa appeared.

(translated by Una Dimitrijević)