Rich Text Document (draft of September 2010)
The Birds
YELLOW and filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It would not stretch far enough for the many roofs, and they stood out black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing inside them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, the dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale, the black pipes of the Devil’s organs. The chimney sweeps could not drive away the crows that perched in the evenings, like living black leaves, on the branches of the trees by the church. They rose up again, flapping, finally to cling once more, each to its own place on its own branch. And at daybreak they took to the air in great flocks—clouds of soot, flakes of undulating and fantastic lampblack, smearing the dull-yellow streaks of the dawn with their twinkling cawing. The days hardened in the cold and boredom like last year’s bread loaves. We cut them with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness.
Father no longer left the house. He lit the stoves and studied the never to be fathomed essence of fire—he savoured the salty, metallic taste and smoky aroma of the winter flames, a cool caress of salamanders licking the shiny soot in the chimney’s throat. He undertook with enthusiasm in those days all the repairs in the loftier regions of the parlour. He could be seen at any time of day, squatting at the top of a stepladder as he tinkered with something near the ceiling, near the cornices of the tall windows or the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. As house painters do, he used his stepladder like enormous stilts—and he felt happy in that bird’s-eye perspective, close to the ceiling’s painted sky, its arabesques and birds. He took himself further and further away from the affairs of practical life. Should Mother, filled with anxiety and concern over his condition, attempt to draw him into a conversation about the business, about the bills due at the end of the month, he would listen to her distractedly, thoroughly vexed, and with twitches in his absent face. Sometimes he would interrupt her with a sudden, imploring gesture of the hand, to scurry to a corner of the room, to press his ear to a chink between the floorboards, and with the index fingers of both hands upraised, indicating the supreme importance of the investigation—to listen. We had not yet come to understand the lamentable background to these eccentricities, the gloomy complex ripening in the depths.
Mother held no influence over him, while to Adela he bestowed great reverence and attention. When she swept the parlour it was to him a great and important ceremony, one that he never neglected to bear witness to, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. To her every action he ascribed some deeper, symbolic meaning—and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance. Tears streamed from his eyes then, his face was choked up with silent laughter, and his body trembled with the pleasurable spasm of an orgasm. He was ticklish to the point of madness. Adela merely had to point a finger at him, with a motion suggesting tickling, and already he was fleeing in a wild panic through all the rooms, fastening their doors behind him, finally to collapse in the last, on his stomach on the bed, twisting in convulsions of laughter provoked by that singular inner vision he could least endure. And thanks to this, Adela held almost unlimited authority over Father.
We noticed then for the first time in Father a passionate interest in animals. At first this was the passion of a hunter and an artist combined. It was also perhaps one creature’s deeper, zoological liking for kindred, and yet so different, life forms—experimentation in the unexplored registers of being.
Only at a later stage did the affair take that peculiar, embroiled and deeply sinful turn against nature that would be better not brought to the light of day.
It all began with the incubation of birds’ eggs.
With a great outlay of effort and expense, Father obtained, from Hamburg, Holland and African zoological stations, fertilised birds’ eggs, and he set enormous Belgian hens to incubating them. It was a process highly interesting to me too, that hatching out of nestlings, real anomalies of shape and colouration. It was improbable to envision in those monsters—their enormous, fantastic beaks yawning wide open the moment they were born, hissing voraciously in the abysses of their throats—in those salamanders with the frail, naked bodies of hunchbacks—the peacocks, pheasants, wood grouse and condors they were to become. Consigned to baskets, in cotton wool, that dragon brood lifted up on thin necks their blind and walleyed heads, squawking voicelessly from their mute throats. My father walked along the shelves in a green apron, like a gardener along his cactus frames, and from nothingness he coaxed those blind blisters pulsating with life, those listless abdomens taking in the external world only in the form of food, those excrescences of life, scrabbling gropingly toward the light. Some weeks later, when those blind buds of life had finally burst into the light, the rooms were filled with the colourful chirruping, the twinkling twittering of their new inhabitants. They perched on the wooden pelmets and the mouldings on the wardrobes; they nested in the thicket of the tin branches and arabesques of the many-armed hanging lamps.
When Father studied his great ornithological compendiums, browsing through their coloured plates, then out of them seemed to fly those fledged phantasms, filling the room with colourful fluttering, slivers of crimson, shreds of sapphire, verdigris and silver. At feeding time they comprised a colourful, surging patch on the floor, a living carpet which fell to pieces upon anyone’s incautious entry, rent asunder into animated flowers, fluttering into the air, to perch at last in the loftier regions of the parlour. A certain condor remains especially in my memory, an enormous bird with a bare neck, its face wrinkled and rank with excrescences. It was a gaunt ascetic, a Buddhist lama, with impassive dignity in its whole demeanour, comporting itself according to the strict etiquette of its great tribe. As it sat opposite Father, unmoving in its monumental posture of the ancient Egyptian gods, its eye clouding over with a white film which spread from the edge to the pupil, enclosing it entirely in contemplation of its venerable solitude, it seemed, with its stone-hard profile, to be an older brother of my father: the very same substance of its body, its tendons, and its wrinkled, hard skin, the same dried and bony face with those same deep, horny sockets. Even Father’s long and thin hands, hardened into nodules, and his curling nails, had their analogon in the condor’s talons. Seeing it asleep, I could not resist the impression that I was looking at a mummy—the mummy, shrunken by desiccation, of my father. Neither, as I believed, had this astonishing resemblance escaped Mother’s notice, although we never pursued the topic. It was characteristic that the condor and my father used the same chamber pot.
Not confining himself to the incubation of ever younger specimens, my father arranged ornithological weddings; he dispatched matchmakers, and tethered the enticing, ardent fiancées in the gaps and hollows of the attic. And he succeeded, in fact, in turning the roof of our house—an enormous, shingled span-roof—into a veritable bird’s inn, a Noah’s ark to which winged creatures of all kinds would flock from faraway places. Even long after the liquidation of the avian farm, that tradition regarding our house continued to be observed in the avian realm, and many a time during the springtime migrations, whole hosts of cranes, pelicans, peacocks and birds of all kinds would alight on our roof.
By and by, however, after its brief magnificence, the venture took a sad turn. A final translocation of Father was soon imposed, to two rooms in the attic which served as lumber rooms, and the mingled early dawn clamour of the birds’ voices now reached us from there. Augmented by the resonance of the roof’s expanse, those wooden boxes of attic rooms rang throughout with uproar—fluttering and crowing, hoots and gurgles. Thus was Father lost to our sight throughout several weeks. He came down to the apartment only occasionally, and only then could we perceive that he was somewhat diminished, had lost weight, and shrunk. Sometimes in his forgetfulness he would start up from his seat at table and let out protracted hoots, beating his arms like wings, and a cloud of leucoma would come to his eyes. But afterwards, embarrassed, he laughed along with us and tried to make light of the incident.
One day, during her general housework, Adela appeared without warning in Father’s ornithological kingdom. Standing in the doorway, she wrung her hands at the stench rising in the air, at the heaps of excrement covering the floor, the tables and the furniture. With hasty decisiveness, she threw open the window, and with the aid of her long brushes she set the whole mass of birds whirling. An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings and screeches rose up, and in its midst Adela, looking like a furious mænad half obscured by the whirling of her thyrsus, danced a dance of destruction. My father, beating his arms in dismay, tried to raise himself into the air along with his flock of birds. The winged storm-cloud slowly thinned until at last Adela was standing alone on the battlefield, exhausted and breathing hard—and my father, with an air of distress and shame, was ready to accede to any capitulation.
A moment later, my father descended the stairway of his dominion—a broken man, an exile king who had lost both throne and reign.
> -Mannequins- >