The day Thomas acquired the goldfinch, Algiers was sweltering under a cloud of vapor. Inside his indigo-shuttered apartment, Hocine lay on the couch, legs bare beneath a striped djellaba, fanning himself.

The stairwell was painted blue; it smelled of cardamom and cement. Ousmane and Thomas climbed three flights in the dimness: a yellow, trembling light filtered through the panes of frosted glass in the roof, barely penetrating down to the first floor. Thomas sits quietly while the cousins greet each other, embracing warmly, then a rapid conversation in Arabic that sounds like pistachio shells being bitten apart. He doesn’t recognize Ousmane’s face when he speaks his native language; it takes on new shapes—his jaw retracting, gums exposed, eyes rolling and sounds emerging from the back of his throat, from a complicated area far behind the tonsils, new vowels held then clicked under the palate—so that he almost looks like someone else, like a stranger, and Thomas feels flustered. The tone of the exchange alters when Ousmane announces in French the reason for their visit: my friend would like to hear the goldfinches. Ah, Hocine turns toward Thomas, and maybe adopt one? he asks craftily, with a wink. Maybe. Thomas smiles.

Arriving the day before, after crossing the Mediterranean for the first time, the young man was bewitched by the perfectly curved bay of Algiers and by the city ranged beyond it, the blues and the whites, the crowds of young people, the smell of the water-sprayed sidewalks, the dragon trees in the Jardin d’Essai, their interlacing branches creating a sort of fantastical vault. A beauty that was not voluptuous but stripped bare. He felt intoxicated. New sensations called to him and turned his world upside down in a mixture of sensory excitement and a supercharged awareness of what surrounded him: life was unfiltered here, and so was he. He tapped euphorically at the bulge in his pocket formed by the cash rolled up inside a little handkerchief.

Hocine walks to his balcony, pushes open the shutters, and leans out into the street, clapping his hands, shouting orders. Ousmane shouts back at him in Arabic, apparently begging, please, no, don’t go to any trouble, but here they are, being brought up to the room, soups and skewered meats, bowls of cereal as light as foam, orange salads with mint leaves, and honey cakes. After the meal, Hocine places the cages on the ceramic tiles that cover the floor, using the patterns on the cages to align them properly. The birds are tiny—four or five inches high—with disproportionately large throats and abdomens. Their plumage is unspectacular, their claws matchstick-thin, their eyes staring. They stand on gently swinging little wooden trapezes. Thomas and Ousmane crouch a few feet away from the cages while Hocine collapses onto a pouffe at the back of the room. He makes a sound a little like a yodel and the recital begins: the birds sing, each in turn and then all together—a canon. The two young men dare not look at each other or touch each other.

*   *   *

And yet, everyone said that the goldfinch was vanishing from the face of the earth. The goldfinches from Bainem Forest, from Kaddous, from Dely Brahim, from Souk Ahras—all gone. Those populations, once so dense, were now threatened with extinction by intensive hunting. The cages hung by the doors of houses in the Casbah squeaked as they moved in the wind, all empty, while the merchants’ cages were now filled with canaries and parakeets; the only goldfinches to be found were kept in dark back rooms, guarded like treasure, the birds’ value swelling with their rarity—simple capitalist logic. You could maybe buy some on Friday evenings in El Harrach, in the east of the city, but everyone knew that the specimens exhibited there, just like those at the Bab El Oued market, had never fluttered over Algerian hills, nested in the branches of the pines and cork oaks that grew there, had not been captured in the traditional manner, with birdlime, the nonsinging females immediately released in order to ensure reproduction; those birds did not sing. They came from the Moroccan border, from the Maghnia region, where they were hunted in their thousands, caught in nets that made no distinction between males and females, then brought to the capital through shady channels where opportunist guys under twenty maneuvered and manipulated, young unemployed men who had given up their dead-end jobs and fought like demons to gain a foothold in this business, drawn by the juicy rewards on offer, guys who knew nothing about birds—and, anyway, most of the specimens, tangled in the nets, died of stress during transportation.

Hocine kept his expensive birds behind the Place des Trois-Horloges—real Algerian goldfinches. He always kept at least ten of them and had never had any other profession, being recognized as an expert throughout Bab El Oued and beyond. He knew every species, its characteristics and metabolism, could tell from the way it sang the provenance of each bird, even the name of the forest where it was born; people came from afar to solicit his services, authenticating, assessing, spotting fakes—Morocccan specimens sold as Algerian ones, which were often ten times more expensive; females sold as males. Hocine did not work with the networks, but did the hunting himself, alone, with birdlime, going off for several days to “his places” in the Béjaïa and Collo valleys, and when he got home he would spend most of his time treasuring his captures. As goldfinches were judged by the beauty of their songs, he worked hard to teach them melodies—the birds from Souk Ahras had a reputation for being able to memorize the highest number of songs—using an old tape player that played the music in a loop as soon as the sun rose (he did not subscribe to the methods of the younger breeders: covering the cage with a blanket, making two slits in it, and running MP3 earbuds through the holes so the birds would hear the song all night). But the appeal of the goldfinch went beyond the musicality of its song and was linked, above all, to geography: its song was the manifestation of a territory. Valley, city, mountain, forest, hill, stream. It brought a landscape to life, evoked a topography, gave the feeling of a soil and a climate. A piece of the planetary puzzle took form in its beak, and just as the witch in the fairy tale would spit out toads and diamonds, just as the crow in the fable released the morsel of cheese from its beak, so the goldfinch expectorated something solid, scented, tactile, and colored. So it was that Hocine’s eleven birds sang the cartography of a vast territory.

His customers—businessmen in ties, wearing beige or pale-gray suits and round, gold-colored metal-framed sunglasses—would turn up at his house in the middle of the afternoon like junkies in need of a fix. The birds sang, and the buyers remembered walking in sandals over pine needles, bunches of cyclamens and pink milk-cap mushrooms; they loosened their ties, drank lemonade, and—with the bird’s song determining its value—prices were discussed. Hocine made a good living. One day, the young heir to an oil company swapped his car, a Peugeot 205, for the last Bainem goldfinch Hocine ever possessed, a deal that gave rise to the legend of this otherwise stoic breeder: the bird was easily worth that, more fabulous than the genie of the magic lamp, it was not only a bird, but a whole threatened forest, and the sea that bordered it, and everything that lived inside it, the part for the whole, it was Creation itself, it was childhood.

When the concert ended, the debate began. Which one do you like? Hocine asked, speaking with his mouth close to Thomas’s face. Ousmane watched his friend with amusement, enjoying the situation. Which one do you like? Tell him! Don’t be afraid! I like them all! Thomas pointed to a cage—inside it, the bird ceased swinging on its perch. Hocine glanced at Ousmane and nodded. They exchanged a few words in Arabic. Ousmane started to laugh. Thinking he was being taken for a ride, Thomas took a step back, behind the cages. Silence spread through the room. Thomas’s hand slipped inside his pocket and his fingers fiddled with the handkerchief. He stamped his feet pointedly, not daring to say let’s go. Hocine announced the price of the bird he had chosen. In a soft voice, Ousmane explained: It’s a bird from Collo, ash, elm, eucalyptus, it’s young, you’ll be able to raise it yourself, teach it, this bird is from my village. Thomas, suddenly filled with wonder, stroked the bird’s back through the bars of the cage; he thought for a long time, and then unfolded the roll of bills. I hope you took your commission, he told Ousmane as they walked downstairs.