Vesper Flights. Helen MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ murmurations look from a distance like a single pulsing, living organism. In a 1799 notebook entry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of a murmuration that shaped itself into various forms and moved ‘like a body unindued with voluntary power’. Sometimes they seem uncannily like an alien, groping entity, living sand or smoke moving through a suite of topological changes. Murmurations are thrilling, but they can also provoke an emotion akin to fear.

      And fear is in large part why many of these flocks exist. Cranes, for example, roost in shallow water because it is safer than sleeping on the ground; and the sheer profusion of beating wings makes it hard for predators to focus on any single starling in a murmuration. No starling wants to be on the edge of the flock, or among the first to land. Anne Goodenough, who runs the Royal Society of Biology and University of Gloucestershire international starling survey, speculates that murmurations may act as signposts to invite other starlings to join a specific roost and increase its size – in cold weather, large roosts keep birds warm. But in the air, fear is the factor shaping the flocks, pressing and contorting them as they fly. A dark, shivering wave running through a mass of starlings is often a response to a raptor diving into the flock in search of a meal.

      It is nearly dark now at the Hortobágy fishponds, and my ears ring with the cacophony of calling cranes. There is boiling confusion over the lake as flocks come from all directions to join the mass on the water that now looks like stippled, particulate fog. White-fronted geese are pouring in, too, tumbling and sideslipping from the sky through swathes of other wings. Suddenly it is almost too much to bear. I feel uncomfortably disoriented. Big flocks of birds can do this. Birders have described the experience of watching flocks of rooks at nightfall as so confusing and noisy that it produces in the viewer something close to motion sickness.

      In search of something solid, I peer through a spotting scope focused on the far side of the lake. In the circle of the viewfinder, the confusion resolves into individual birds. It’s so dark that their colour has leached away. I am watching stately groups of cranes in greyscale, landing, drinking, shaking their loose feathers, greeting one another and getting on with the business of finding a place to sleep. The switch in recognition is eerie: I go from seeing rushing patterns in the sky to the realisation that they are made of thousands of beating hearts and eyes and fragile frames of feather and bone. I watch the cranes scratching their beaks with their toes and think of how the starling flocks that pour into reed beds like grain turn all of a sudden into birds perching on bowed stems, bright-eyed, their feathers spangled with white spots that glow like small stars. I marvel at how confusion can be resolved by focusing on the things from which it is made. The magic of the flocks is this simple switch between geometry and family.

      As I stand there watching the cranes, my mind turns to human matters. The village we’d stayed in the previous night had felt so much like my home in the fens. It had the same damp, underwater air, chickens roaming around backyards, poplars, piles of winter firewood. Before I came here I’d asked a few British friends who’d spent time in Hungary what it was like, and several said that the strangest thing about it was how much it felt like home. It’s painful to recall that now. It has been nagging away at me all the time I’ve been here, the razor-wire fence the government has erected more than a hundred miles south of here to stop Syrian refugees walking across the border from Serbia; the thought of crowds moving slowly north-east as the cranes move southwest. Watching the flock has brought home to me how easy it is to react to the idea of masses of refugees with the same visceral apprehension with which we greet a cloud of moving starlings or tumbling geese, to view it as a singular entity, strange and uncontrollable and chaotic. But the crowds coming over the border are people just like us. Perhaps too much like us. We do not want to imagine what it would be like to have our familiar places reduced to ruins. In the face of fear, we are all starlings, a group, a flock, made of a million souls seeking safety. I love the flock not simply for its biological exuberance, but for the way it has prompted me to pick similarity out of strangeness, for the way its chaos was transformed, on reflection, to individuals and small family groups wanting the simplest things: freedom from fear, food, a place to safely sleep.

The Student’s Tale

      There’s a window and the rattle of a taxi and grapes on the table, black ones, sweet ones, and the taxi is also black and there’s a woman inside it, a charity worker who befriended you when you were in detention, and she’s leaning to pay the driver and through the dust and bloom of the glass I see you standing on the pavement next to the open taxi door and your back is turned towards me so all I can see are your shoulders hunched in a blue denim jacket. They’re set in a line that speaks of concern, not for yourself, but for the woman who is paying the fare. I wave through the window and you turn and see me and smile hello.

      This is a borrowed house that we’re talking in. It’s not my home.

      We sit at the table and I don’t know where to begin.

      I don’t know anything about you.

      It is hard to ask questions.

      You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story. I don’t want to ask you questions, because I think of all the questions you must have been asked before. But you want me to ask you questions, and so I begin with: when did you get here? And you write, in careful Persian numerals, 12, 2016. December. And I ask more questions, and you answer them, and when the English words won’t come, you translate using your phone, and this takes some time, and the sun slaps its flat gold light upon the table and the bowl of grapes and the teapot, all these quiet domestic things, as I wait to know what you might mean. Here are the words you look up while we talk: Apostate. Bigoted. Depraved. Hide.

      You are a student of epidemiology. Epidemiologists study the mode of transmission of disease, the way it runs through populations from person to person. You tell me that back in your country you used to meet with your friends in your restaurant at night so you could talk of Christianity and read the Bible. There were Christian signs in your restaurant. You knew that you might be arrested for doing this. Secrecy is paramount, but faith is also faith.

      This is what happens when you are denounced as an apostate. The authorities speak of you as if you were one of the agents of disease that you have studied. At prayers one Friday they denounce you, by name, in five regions, two cities and three villages. They said that a woman at your university had depraved you, by which they meant she had encouraged you to become a Christian. They said that you had changed your religion. And that now you possess this faith, you spread it to other men.

      They see your belief as a contagious disease. They want to isolate it, contain it, and like all such malevolent metaphors that equate morality with health, the cure is always extinguishment. You know what happens to apostates, to those who have changed their religion, in your country. Even I know what happens. I am holding my breath just thinking of it.

      When the intelligence services came looking for you at your grandmother’s home she called you and told you that these men were your friends even though they spoke the wrong language for the region and they were wearing distinctive clothes that made it obvious, really, who they were, and why they were there, but she was old and you couldn’t blame her for expecting friendship when what was offered was its scorched obverse. Your uncle knew better. He told you to flee. Your life is in danger, he said. Truth. So you fled. You left everything.

      You drove from city to city and, in a city more distant, met two friends of your uncle. They told you they could take you to Europe with others by car. And once you were there, you wondered where you should go. Your uncle said, The UK is good, and he offered to pay the smuggling agents to get you here. The car unloaded you all in an unkempt garden and you had to hide there until the middle of the night when the truck came, and you got in.

      Days in the darkness inside a lorry on its way north. A freezer truck. СКАЧАТЬ