There is a nightingale in Oliver’s room. It is a dark, gentle and curious creature. The nightingale is flying across the room, landing on top of a book of poems, on a neatly folded woman’s autumn coat, and finally on Oliver’s shoulder. Yet, however much the nightingale tries, it cannot capture Oliver’s attention, who was now carefully taking out a handful of red roses wrapped in newspapers, does not realize the predicament that the nightingale was in. What the nightingale wanted was, more than anything, Oliver’s love. But the nightingale was only a nightingale, made out of a single strand of a woman’s hair. The nightingale was almost a woman, but not quite complete.

Oliver had heard the story of the nightingales as a child. His mother had read it to him from The Book of Kindliness before he went to sleep. He knows that nightingales only come to those in need. He has seen their presence by the window of his friends, his neighbors, his relatives, even his mother.

The nightingale arrived one morning, when Oliver opened his window to clear out the cigarette smoke from the night before. The girl he loved had just broken his heart, and as she delivered her strange, ambiguous reasons, she was smoking her usual menthol cigarettes, and rather than acting with decency, she did not open the window or made use of the ashtray that he had bought just for her. He gathered her cigarettes with faded red lipstick wrapped around the tips, and after momentarily considering whether or not he should keep them, Oliver decided to flush them down the toilet so that he would not look for them in the trashcan when he begins to long for her. He knows he is prone to sentimentality, and that is why his apartment is filled with objects from the past that he cannot bear to part from. He realizes that his apartment is filled with smoke, and gathering his heavy, broken self, he opens the window for fresh air. That is when the nightingale arrived.

The nightingale waited for Oliver to acknowledge her, but the young man stayed quiet. So the nightingale began to sing. It was a small delivery, so sweet and pious, that Oliver momentarily forgot that the night before, the girl he loved had confessed how she had never loved him, and that besides the strong odor of menthol cigarettes and cheap floral soap in his apartment, she had also left a few of her belongings, which he had had to mail to her. And then he remembered all of this, and he carried himself back to his bed, where he had slept next to her but not quite held her because she had never let him, and drifted off to a deep sleep, hoping that the smoke will be gone by the time that he wakes up.

The smoke had disappeared when he woke up in the afternoon, but the nightingale had stayed. The nightingale had watched over Oliver, studying the pale face of the dark-haired young man, that it would have to nurse until he found love, or peace, whichever came first. When the nightingale saw that he was having nightmares, it sang a lullaby to him until his breathing became steady and continued to sleep peacefully. Of course, he did not know this. He only felt that the pain deep within him had momentarily subsided.

One night, the nightingale left its tree and returned to the sky where the nightingale knew God would be. The nightingale found God planting a handful of trees across a valley.

“Dear God,” the nightingale said, “Assign me to another person, someone who needs me more, someone in the face of war, someone who holds a bowl of alms, someone who’s body is failing, someone who needs my voice.”

“Why, dear nightingale?” God said, “We are given the burden that we have the capacity to bear. You are but a young and innocent nightingale, I cannot send you to poverty or war or illnesses before you understand love.”

“Love?” the nightingale said. “What is that?”

“It is the curse that you have to heal Oliver from. It is the desire to have and to be with a person, completely. And this curse, unlike war or poverty or illnesses, does not manifest itself through the body, but through the heart.”

From then on, the nightingale would wake Oliver up just after the sun has risen. In the beginning, he would lie on his back, stare at the ceiling and start reminiscing about the girl who had broken his heart. He caressed the side of the bed that she used to lie on on those wintry nights. Oliver had made only a single phone call to let the university know that he would be absent for a few weeks due to increasing asthma attacks. The nightingale felt disappointed by Oliver’s abandonment of the world, how he no longer paid attention to the books and papers on his table, how he ignored all telephone calls, how he let every letter that arrived go unopened.

So one morning, the nightingale came into his room, which was always filled with the smell of clove cigarettes and aftershave. He flew gently above Oliver’s head, barely touching him, but creating enough movement to stir him from sleep. It reminded Oliver of his mother’s hand caressing his head to wake him up, so he suddenly sat up, expecting to find his mother sitting by his bed. Instead, he found the nightingale.

“Where did you come from?” he asked the nightingale, smiling for the first time in months. He did not feel sad from his mother’s absence, but amused that after all this time, he still had a memory of her. The nightingale landed on his shoulder. Oliver looked out the window and caressed the nightingale timidly with his index finger. When the nightingale showed no sign of flying off, he continued stroking her wings.

“Why didn’t you come when my mother died?” The nightingale could not answer this, so instead, the nightingale sang another song. From then on, he would sit up in his bed every morning and listen to the nightingale’s songs. Then, he would prepare a warm breakfast, not forgetting to place small fruits and berries by the windowsill for the excited nightingale. Perhaps longing for someone to talk to, or perhaps because of the calming presence of the nightingale, Oliver started telling the nightingale everything: his thoughts on the news, his unfinished research, his childhood, his mother’s illness which took her away when he was 5, his father’s illustrious career as an historian until his death of old age and all of his romantic failures.

The young woman he was in a relationship with had decided to leave him in the beginning of their winter semester, he told her. She was tired of him, she said, of his slowness, his resistance to spontaneity and his deliberate kindness. These, for Oliver, were strange, ambiguous reasons to leave someone for. Oliver was strong-willed, he liked routines and familiarity, he wanted everything to be clear and within reason. He had followed his father’s footsteps to become a history professor. He receives good grades and even works as a teaching assistant. The problem was he had always fallen for girls who seemed only to have a past. He wanted to fix them, but in the end, they broke him. Now, all he wished for was not for her return, but that she had stayed a little bit longer, at least until the semester was over. For him, that was the most difficult part from the whole thing. His heartbreak was wrongly timed.

The nightingale understood this and never interrupted Oliver, who, as he talked, would stare off into an empty space as he smoked his clove cigarettes.

One night, a nightingale appeared on the branches of a tree next to the window of the apartment next to Oliver.

“Hello,” the nightingale said to the new inhabitant.

“Hello there,” the inhabitant said. “It’s quite cold here.”

“Yes, it has been for the past few weeks,” the nightingale replied. The nightingale curiously tried to look into the window of Oliver’s neighbor, but it was dark, and all it could see was the outline of a sleeping young man.

“What were you sent for?” the nightingale asked.

“He is dying,” the neighbor’s nightingale said.

“And he knows this?” the nightingale asked.

“He knows,” the neighbor’s nightingale said. “And what are you here for?”

“Some kind of longing,” the nightingale said.

“And he knows?”

“No,” the nightingale said.

Oliver didn’t notice the presence of the nightingale by his neighbor’s window, and went about his life as usual.

One night, Oliver was woken up, not by the nightingale, but by a commotion in the hallway of his building. Oliver rose from his bed and opened the door of his apartment to find several men in white uniforms. The nightingale was also curious, until it saw the neighbor’s nightingale preparing to leave.

“What happened?”

“He died,” the neighbor’s nightingale said.

“I’m sorry.”

The neighbor’s nightingale bowed his head as a gesture of farewell and flew off into the sky, leaving behind its feather by the neighbor’s windowsill. Oliver returned to his bed and sat. One of the apartment residents told him that his neighbor, who, like him, had been a student and a teaching assistant in the science faculty, had taken his life. He had watched the men in white uniforms carry his neighbor’s body on a stretcher. It almost seemed like he was only asleep. He thought about this until he too fell asleep underneath the luminous moon.

The next morning, Oliver woke up with a sense of contentment in his heart, and as he sat up in bed, he decided that he would return to the university. He had his breakfast and had a warm shower, and as the nightingale watched Oliver slowly shave his face, the nightingale felt a deep sorrow within its chest. The nightingale could not understand why this was so for it should have felt happiness for having helped Oliver return to the world. The nightingale sang mournfully as Oliver gathered his books and paper into his briefcase, wore his winter coat and locked the apartment door behind him. For the rest of the day, the nightingale waited for Oliver to come home.

One evening, Oliver didn’t come home at the usual time. The nightingale watched for the door to open, for the crack of light from the hallway, for Oliver’s tall, firm body to appear, but he didn’t appear until after midnight. The nightingale heard the sound of his keys being turned, and then from the crack of light in the hallway, it saw two figures. The figures were Oliver and a young woman with long, black hair and an almost translucent skin. The pair moved together, his hand holding hers, his leg between hers, his fingers tangled in her hair, his lips locked onto her lips, until in the dark, he managed to find the door to his bedroom. The pair collapsed into his bed, like he does alone every night, and produced sounds, movements, pleasures, that the nightingale had never seen before, until finally, it seemed that they have had enough, with the world and with each other.

They were still holding each other when they woke up. They were half-dressed, and so the nightingale was spared the pain of having to see the young woman’s beauty. That morning, Oliver displayed his deep affection for the woman. He folded her clothes on top of a towel and placed it outside of his bathroom while she showered. He made her breakfast and gave her the bigger portion of the toast, the eggs, the cup of coffee. Then, when they were both ready, he kissed her forehead and they left the together. Ever since the woman lived in Oliver’s apartment, they always kept the windows closed, for she could not stand the evening breeze. So the nightingale stopped singing, and Oliver himself did not notice the nightingale’s silence. Until one day, the woman woke up and opened the window.

“This nightingale is always by your window,” she said to Oliver, who was still half-asleep. The nightingale was surprised and flew off to a higher branch.

“Yes, it has accompanied me for the past few months. Funny, it hasn’t sang in a while. Sing for her, my friend,” Oliver said. The nightingale flew toward an even higher branch. The woman laughed kindly and walked back toward the bed.

That night, the nightingale left its tree and returned to the sky where the nightingale knew God would be. The nightingale found God creating a storm above a valley.

“Dear God,” the nightingale said. “Transform me into a person. Tear me apart and place my soul in an unborn woman. Make my hair dark and my body translucent.”

“Why, dear nightingale?” God said, “We are given the burden that we have the capacity to bear. You are but a young and innocent nightingale, I cannot send you to love before you understand poverty or war or illnesses.”

“But what about Oliver?”

“It is the curse that you have to heal from. You have to learn to let go of the desire to have and to be with a person, completely. And this curse, unlike war or poverty or illnesses, does not manifest itself through the body, but through the heart.”

There is a nightingale outside of Oliver’s room. It is a dark, gentle and curious creature. The nightingale is flying around the window, landing from branch to branch, brushing the leaves with its wings. Yet, however much the nightingale tries, neither Oliver nor the woman sleeping next to him can hear the nightingale’s song. What the nightingale wanted was, more than anything, Oliver’s love. But the nightingale was only a nightingale, made out of a single strand of a woman’s hair. The nightingale was almost a woman, but not quite complete. The nightingale finally landed on a branch. Inside, the room was dark and warm, and the nightingale could see a pair of sleeping figures. And then, the nightingale flew toward the glass window.

***

Rain Chudori is a writer and translator. She has written for The Jakarta Post, The Jakarta Globe, Tempo, Salihara and other publications. Her first book, Monsoon Tiger and Other Stories, was published by KPG and was exhibited at Frankfurt Book Fair and London Book Fair.

We are looking for contemporary fiction between 1,500-2,000 words by established and new authors. Stories must be original and previously unpublished in English. The email for submitting stories is: shortstory@thejakartapost.com

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