Read Online The Bird Market of Paris by Nikki Moustaki - Free Book Online Page B

entrance to the nest as she warmed the eggs. Female lovebirds brood their eggs, unlike cockatiels and pigeons, who share egg-warming duties, though at night both lovebird parents will sleep inside the nest.
    After a few weeks, peeping erupted from the nest, cheeping impossibly loud for a baby bird, amplified by the acoustics inside the wooden box. I shined a flashlight into the entry hole. Bonk backed into a corner, hissing, beak open, tongue wagging. I taunted her out of her box with a pen near the nest’s hole, and when she hopped out to attack I saw a little pink coil wriggling on its back next to four eggs, a loud, wailing baby like Bonk had been, but pinker and wrigglier.
    I called Poppy.
    â€œNow I am a great- great grandfather, Chérie !” he said. “What are you doing to me? People will believe me to be much older than I am.”
    Two more of Bonk’s eggs hatched in the next few days. Watching the three babies grow was phenomenal, like watching a storm roll over the ocean. Every moment brought something new, a shift in color or pattern. They sat together in a green lump and scrambled away from me when I opened the box. I wanted to hold them, but Bonk wouldn’t let me.
    Bonk and Binky proved to be devoted parents. Binky fed Bonk, who returned inside to feed the chicks. About nine weeks after they hatched, the babies fledged, venturing from the box for short periods, and rushing back inside when I entered the room. A few weeks after that, Bonk wouldn’t let them back into the nest, nipping them if they tried to squeeze through the round opening. She had laid another egg.
    In the short time between Bonk finding her mate and her babies fledging from the nest, I collected more than thirty new lovebirds. I put them to nest, and hand-fed the two-week-old chicks so my babies would be tame. I built rough-looking flight cages and aviaries to house the babies. The world dissolved when I tended to the birds, and I wanted more of that feeling. I needed more birds.

 
    Chapter 7
    Until the age of twelve I had had both feet in Poppy’s teetotaler camp, save the odd sips of wine or beer from an adult’s glass, to taste. Sliding into thirteen, I’d had my doubts. What was the big deal? Drinking looked fun and grown-up, and I wanted nothing more than to be an adult. If I drank alcohol I’d grow up faster.
    Some of the kids I knew had bars in their houses, or collections of liquor bottles in kitchen cabinets. Sometimes we’d sip the peppermint or peach schnapps, then pour water into the bottle to make up the deficit. I liked the sting and heat, and the way a small taste pirouetted to my head.
    One mom I knew was drunk all the time. She was the wife of a drug dealer who bought Ferraris from my dad, so it was easy to steal booze from the wet bar by the pool when my dad took me there to spend the night with the drug dealer’s three redheaded daughters. Once, their mom, all cheetah print pants and off-the-shoulder T-shirt, staggered into the bedroom where we were sprawled in front of the television, and slurred, “Are you girls listening to Jeff Leper?” We had Duran Duran’s “Girls on Film” video playing on MTV, but we knew she meant Def Leppard and we laughed. I liked taking sips of alcohol, but I never wanted to get that kind of drunk.
    My parents didn’t toss vodka into plants like Poppy did. They didn’t drink vodka. They drank beer and wine. Beer was disgusting, and I couldn’t drink half a bottle of wine, pour water into it, and expect to escape notice. There was no way to sneak alcohol at home, but my parents had a “European” idea about the relationship between children and alcohol: they thought if they made it off-limits when I was young, I’d want it more when I grew up. Working on this theory, I asked for wine every time they drank it. At a restaurant, they’d pour a tiny pool of red wine into a wineglass and fill the rest