Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  In 2005, in order to agitate these “inborn maps,” ornithologist Hans Wallraff and his team of German interns trapped pigeons in a drum, deprived them of light, and rotated them at speeds of up to 100 revolutions per minute (for hours, sometimes days at a time) in a variable magnetic field. When released, these birds were still able to home perfectly, so the next step involved trapping them again and severing the horizontal semicircular canals of their middle ears. Still, mutilated, in some kind of baffling pain, carrying their fresh lesions, these pigeons found their way home.

  In the spirit of human determination, of undoing natural law, we’ve pumped the birds with heavy anesthesia, put frosted contact lenses into their eyes. We’ve shifted their internal clocks by locking them into darkness chambers during daylight hours and subjecting them to artificial light at night. We’ve forced them to carry ponderous magnets on their feet and beneath their wings.

  Never mind that, in many of our favorite mythologies, we’ve considered them holy. (In scientific nomenclature, there’s no difference between a pigeon and a dove.) Never mind that the Bible engages the pigeon variously as the harbinger of spring and purity and peace, as an object of perfection and beauty, glistening with gold, as a symbol for our own wistfulness, the gentlest term of endearment, as an exhibitor of the temperament to which we should aspire, as a stand-in for the Spirit of God descending; and exalts it for the softness of its eyes, simple displays of affection, comeliness of countenance, richness of plumage, and sweetness of voice. Never mind that Jesus overturned the tables and chairs of abusive dove salesmen, and drove the men out of the temple. Never mind that the ancient Greeks called pigeons peristera (the female form of the word) and named their prettiest islands after them. Never mind that, in Hebrew, the word yonah, dove, also refers to the holy warmth generated by an act of mating.

  Never mind. In order to see if it would affect the birds’ homing abilities, scientists have affixed wire coils to their necks, through which pumped electric current as they flew. With dirty needles, they punctured their air sacs, which contain what we believe to be important chemical sense organs. They stuffed their nasal cavities with wax. Severed the nerves that carry olfactory signals to their brains, and severed their trigeminal nerves so they could no longer detect fluctuations in magnetic fields.

  All of these mangled, overloaded, electrocuted birds—though their speeds were subject to what ornithologist William Keeton dubbed a “disturbing variability”—eventually and twitchily found their way home.

  For centuries, exasperated scientists the world over have discarded their convalescing subjects into fields and meadows, back alleys and bogs, to invariably become meals for lazy hawks.

  After these experiments produced unclear results, some ornithologists began to get philosophical, questioning the difference between the ability to read a compass and to conceptualize a sense of “home,” replete with all of its furtive narratives and comforts. They chalked up the pigeon’s ability to home to a complex and mystifying network of “multifactorial . . . back-up systems.” Some scientists threw up their hands and deduced that the answers they desired remained hidden in the shadows of quantum physics paradoxes, using phrases like “subtle connectivity,” “interacting particles,” and “strong holistic flavour.” Other discouraged scientists, unsatisfied with these vague “conclusions,” began to seek answers to this very peculiar but inspiring pigeon behavior in subdisciplines of pseudoscience: parapsychology, ESP, morphic resonance, even principles of Newtonian alchemy.

  “This philosophy [that codified alchemical formulas lurk between the lines of the Tanekh, or Hebrew Bible],” Newton wrote, “both speculative and active, is not only to be found in the volume of nature, but also in the sacred scriptures, as in Genesis, Job, Psalms, Isaiah and others. In the knowledge of this philosophy, God made Solomon the greatest philosopher in the world.”

  Newton believed that the First Temple in Jerusalem, which Solomon designed, contained in its architecture the answers to mathematical conundrums, among them how to calculate pi and the volume of a hemisphere. And he believed that the Song of Solomon contained secret messages in lines such as, “O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely,” which inspired him to meditate on the face of the pigeon and the pigeon’s coos, which further inspired him to search for connections. He found, as a result, Archytas and the wooden bird, and, in turn, his third law.

  But after the tenets of Newtonian alchemy failed to answer their questions about pigeon navigation, some desperate ornithologists began to seek unlikely overlaps between principles of neuroscience and heritability. If said ornithologists are to believe neuroscientist Marcus Pembrey, of University College London, who concluded that “Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory . . . phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders . . . [even] sensitivity to [a] cherry blossom scent,” then the pigeon knows of its ancestors’ lives as Genghis Khan’s messengers, as carriers of Tipu Sultan’s poetry, silk plantation blueprints, and schematics for the advancement of rocket artillery.

  The pigeon knows that it was once used to announce the winners of the Olympics, the beginnings and ends of wars; that Paul Reuter, founder of the Reuters press agency, compelled its progenitors to transport information about stock prices from one telegraph line terminus to another. That apothecaries depended on them for the delivery of medicine. That rival armies trained hawks to eviscerate the pigeons of their enemies, causing a communication breakdown. That we’ve given to them our voices, that we’ve made of their bodies the earliest and most organic of radio waves; that when we place our faith in the tenacity of the carrier pigeon, our lives and our loves and our heartaches and our deaths can float above us, and the most important parts of our self-narratives are on air.

  These ornithologists seem to be stressing: Perhaps it’s not God who has the answers to our seemingly unanswerable questions about ourselves—as Newton may have believed—but the loaded-up pigeons, some of whom, in a crisis of weight, will unexpectedly land and offer us a clue into the circulatory map of all the things we wish to hide from the rest of our species.

  *

  “I FEEL LIKE THERE’S A POINT WHERE SCIENTISTS GET BORED,” WRITES commenter Digivince on the YouTube page “Pigeons in Space,” “and just do things because they can.” In the video, three bioastronautics scientists of the Aerospace Medical Division of the U.S. Air Force float in zero gravity with disturbing grins, alongside a bunch of bewildered pigeons. The scientists belong to the 6570th headquarters, purportedly responsible for toxicology research. In the “Weightless Bird” clip, in voiceover narration, a man’s measured voice intones, “Pigeons normally keep their bodies in a horizontal axis while in flight. These zero-g birds have lost their feeling for what is up or down, and point in all directions, some even flying upside-down.”

  In nature, a pigeon will turn itself upside-down only when it’s suffering from disease, particularly the paramyxovirus, which causes the afflicted bird to peck at but miss its seed, stagger, crash land, tremor about the eyes and head, have fainting spells, and suffer from painful torticollis (or “twisted neck”) before its nervous system collapses. Experts who work in pigeon rescue joke that the only pigeon that stargazes is a sick pigeon.

  When the video is slowed, one can see the floating scientists reach to pluck at the birds’ feathers as they confusedly flap, covering, in spite of their exertion, to their surprise, no distance. They are saddled with the symptoms of disease, though they are well. This is not normal.

  *

  TO TRAIN A PIGEON, YOU MUST BLIND A PIGEON. KEEP IT IN A BOX so that its wings can’t fully expand, confusing the pigeon as to the parameters of its own body. The pigeon believes its wings are shorter than they are. Some people have neglected their better natures in order to successfully breed a pigeon—like the Oriental frill, for instance�
�that has a beak so truncated, so misshapen according to the dictates of nature, that it can’t even peck the earth for food. It must eat from a special cup, designed by the breeders who designed the bird itself.

  To train a homing pigeon, you must build a dovecote. The better of these pigeon houses include architectural flourishes—mansard roofs and turrets, faux chimneys, and top-of-the-line chicken wire. Prove something to your neighbors. With the chicken wire, define a confined space within the dovecote and, for the pigeon’s own good, tell yourself, lock it into this space for at least five weeks. Feed it, but don’t overfeed it. Pray, before bed, that the pigeon does not damage its feathers on the wire. Your bedroom floor will be dirty with the tools of your training. Pick the seed from your knees.

  At the end of the five weeks, take the bird into your hands. Feel its heart screaming against your fingers. Tell yourself this means that the bird is excited, and that it loves you. If something’s heart beats so furiously into your hands, how can that represent anything but affection? Take the bird outside, remove the wire from the dovecote’s small opening, then push the bird back inside. Its body should hardly fit through. It should be a struggle for both of you. In this struggle: communion, ownership, something of parenthood even. Love.

  Repeat this removal and this shoving back in for the better part of a day. Eventually, the pigeon will realize that if it wants to be fed, it must push itself back through that opening without your guidance. Without your hands. It will do this: shuffle its body along the shaft, shedding its shit and its dander, bumping its head, until it learns how to contort its neck just so. After a couple of weeks, the pigeon will have mapped out the neighborhood—about a square mile of it. Now, you can take the bird even farther out. Try north, south, east, and west, so the pigeon can find its way back to the dovecote from all directions. Two miles this week, five miles next, then ten, then fifty . . . Have faith. Wonder whether faith is always leashed to some prior manipulation. Wonder which is the product of which.

  Tell yourself, my bird will come back, and your bird will come back. Over above-ground swimming pools and in-ground swimming pools, and sprinklers, and garbage trucks, and dim after-hours bars filled with smugglers and insomniacs, your bird will come back. And this is home now.

  *

  THERE’S A PIGEON IN SPACE, BUT THERE’S ALSO A PIGEON IN THE shadows of a bar in the Namaqualand desert, where I watch it bathed in Wurlitzer light and, in panic, making constellations of the sawdust. A pandemonium of wings. The syrupy fluttering of the bird throat.

  Again, Louisa and I can’t sleep, so we’ve come here to drink soft drinks, pretend that they’re hard. We remember the days when that sting of the alcohol on the uvula was a pleasant thing, the precursor to quick, shallow dreaming. We worry about our drive south tomorrow to Alexander Bay. We’ve heard that this isolated stretch of road is often patrolled by armed guards—the unofficial and freelance security force employed by the diamond conglomerates. We worry about encountering Mr. Lester amid the desolation.

  Above the bar, the pigeon collides with a light fixture and the fixture sways as if in an interrogation room. Men laugh. Men sip and swallow and fight in at least three languages. Men exchange secret things in paper bags from Bismillah Superette and Take-Away. On the floorboards, blood or tar or tomato sauce. The pigeon eats a little cloud of stale, too-yellow popcorn. I wonder if Msizi is still awake on his mattress, or if he’s sleeping peacefully. I wonder if he and Bartholomew are planning to smuggle tomorrow. Louisa sips her Appletiser soda, her face so blank it’s not even bored. A man at the bar is showing off a diamond the size of a baby tooth, then thinks better of it and hides it first beneath his coaster, then in the inside pocket of his yellow windbreaker. He will not order another drink. No one will follow him out of the bar but the pigeon. I wonder if they came in together. He is lucky tonight.

  I touch Louisa’s left earlobe—my favorite one. The pigeon, as always, will find its way home, and I just know, sipping my lychee juice, I know that outside, many strange other-hemispheric stars are falling. I can feel it. Great chunks of fire screaming across the cosmos among our satellites, either on their way to terrestrial graves or else destined to tumble, dead, somewhere in the sort of universe we ache to raise birds, and hope, and wealth, and children, within. I wonder how anyone—how anything—can know something if they can’t see it.

  Bartholomew Variation #1

  ONE TO FIVE DAYS PER WEEK, BARTHOLOMEW WAKES INTO THE SORT of circular white light that one might mistake for the sun if it weren’t surrounded by all that darkness. Msizi’s headlamp sweeps the pigeon’s body like a searchlight as he quietly opens the coop door, the hinges of which he greases daily with sunflower oil to protect what he believes to be the bird’s sensitive ears from the squeaking.

  Bartholomew has the coop to himself. He’s Msizi’s last bird, the others having been confiscated by mine security in response to the directives of Mr. Lester, their heads stepped on or twisted off, their bodies ripped by knife or bullet or ballpoint pen or the quill of a previously executed bird—or so the rumors go.

  The sky over Namaqualand turns milky, but the sun is not yet up. Inside, in the kitchen, Msizi’s mother opens the cupboard, traces her finger through the dust on the second shelf from the top. Her shirt pulls up, and her spine presses from her skin like a stack of nickels. She assesses the plastic bottle of sunflower oil, and frowns. Msizi thinks she’s prettiest when frowning. That doesn’t mean he looks forward to disappointing her. She wants to yell at her son but says nothing, permits him his superstitions, his tenderness toward his final bird, her final chance at wealth, and a pilgrimage south toward some nicer area of the Cape, where houses have shingled roofs, windows that close. Some of them even have balconies. The kitchen light flickers, turns itself off before turning itself back on.

  Beneath the orange streetlight in front of their house, the dead bat-eared fox, flattened there since last Friday, decomposes. The insects have taken its eyes, and the red dust has pooled in the sockets. Onto these dunes-in-miniature, the wind has drawn ripples. In the adjacent dead palm, the abandoned and dried nest of some long-gone bird now houses giant crystals of salt. Down the street, that pile of white cinderblock overgrown with red mosses (also dead) used to be a house. The flagpole at the corner sports the tatters of the old apartheid South African flag, and a pair of drying blue overalls.

  Per his neurotic ritual, Msizi hugs the bird to his chest, and says, “Good morning,” three times fast. Msizi replaces the bird in the coop and speaks his name before heading inside for breakfast. Msizi eats his Jungle Oats (“The energy champion!”), and the shadow of his spoon looks large on the inside wall of the dining room that is also his bedroom and his brother’s bedroom. He coughs before swallowing the oats, larded with a little milk and medium-fat margarine. In this way, he nourishes himself for a day spent digging for diamonds at the local mine.

  He coughs and swallows and coughs, as the sun turns Bartholomew’s feathers orange. The bird refuses—given the photopic spectral prowess hiccupping in his genes—to close his eyes against the brightness. It’s like he’s trying to hoard the light for those hours spent packed into a metal lunchbox next to a halved peach chutney sandwich and a single-serving bag of Simba tomato sauce–flavored potato chips.

  Bartholomew, like most other pigeons, is so adaptable, so good. He knows when to coo and when to be quiet.

  Though mineworkers have to pass through the X-ray machine upon entering and leaving the mine, South Africa has made it illegal to overradiate a person; so the machines light up and whir in the same way whether or not they’re conducting an actual X-ray. In this way, the mineworker never knows whether his innards, or the innards of his lunchbox, are being scanned or not—whether they’ve been mildly poisoned and mapped, or given a placebo.

  Msizi finishes his breakfast, cups his hands over the bird’s wings.

  More than 1,300 kilometers away, in a boardroom of the South African Diamond Centre on Johannesburg’s F
ox Street, beneath the stuffed and mounted heads of kudu, springbok, blesbok, and sable, a man named Ngoako A. Ramatlhodi, Minister of Mineral Resources, signs into law amended regulations detailing the penalties for diamond industry infractions, including illicit smuggling and trade. Though the documents do not actually include the word smuggling—costuming the word in heretos, herebys, annexures, and subsections—they do reference increased imprisonment for an indeterminate length of time, increased fines of an indeterminate amount, the termination of mine employment, and expulsion from the mining town. Of course, they mention nothing of the actions of security guards, who sometimes take it upon themselves to bite off the heads of birds and break the fingers of boys.

  Msizi again assesses his companion’s dimensions perfectly, leaving just enough room for his body in the lunchbox, just enough for him to lie his head on the foil of the potato chip bag. As he closes and latches the lid, the bird’s heart quickens.

  Msizi kisses his mother, lets his brother sleep, before walking. His body stutters with each stone he steps on. He passes beneath the town’s sole working streetlamp—the electricity illegally tapped into by the neighborhood’s residents who embody what an anonymously written local newspaper op-ed dubbed “the malign ingenuity of the poor and the damned.” For the eighth day in a row, Msizi passes that dead eyeless fox. It’s starting to depress him.

  Chapter 3

  Beyond the Pits of Alexander Bay

  IN THE SILTY DIAMOND PIT OUTSIDE ALEXANDER BAY, A TOWN AT the northwest corner of South Africa, on the southern bank of the Orange River, boys and men leash diamonds to pigeons. Msizi is among them. They know how not to be seen, how to invisibly hatch their plans. The pigeons are hiding in lunchboxes or amid baggy clothes, or in places more inscrutable. The pit mine is an irregular circle, maybe 400 yards across, where boys and men harvest their portions of what should be about 89,000 total annual carats. Maybe one will get lucky, as one did in 2004, and unearth a flawless diamond of perfect color and clarity that will sell for over 1.8 million U.S. dollars.