City Beasts

by Mark Kurlansky

  “It’s a whole damn murder of them,” said a large American with an enormous broiled red-balled head barely covered by his too-small five-peso straw hat. One of the people with him, a gray-haired American woman, still beautiful in one of those off-the-shoulders tops that Cubans hadn’t worn in a long time, though, Segundo thought, maybe they should, looked up uneasily at the row of birds. “Why do you say ‘murder’?”

  “That’s just what they’re called,” said the large redhead.

  “Why?” she insisted,

  “That’s just what they’re called. A pod of whale, a pride of lions, a murder of crows.”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “No,” said Segundo. “They are really ravens.”

  “Ah,” said the big broiled head from under his little straw hat. “Then it’s an unkindness of ravens.”

  This was what the Yumas were like. They were all experts on something. Their government would not let them come to Cuba unless they were an expert doing research. Segundo tried to decide what kind of experts they were. Clearly not ornithologists or bird-watchers because they did not appear to like birds and they didn’t know a raven from a crow. But they could be biologists. But Segundo decided that they were linguists. The one with the big red head looked like a linguist. Wasn’t that a linguist’s head?

  “Well,” the woman said, and smiled uncertainly. “Unkindness is better than murder.”

  “Are they dangerous?” asked a small worried man in a lime-colored guayabera, who was with the Americans but spoke Puerto Rican Spanish.

  “Why do you say that?” asked the American woman next to him with the bright white lines on her shoulders from having worn a different dress in the daylight.

  Just then several crows let out a scratchy howl. The Americans all looked up uncertainly. And that was it. They finished their meal with hats on, casting nervous glances at the birds on the wires, the murder of crows.

  Night after night, usually at about eight-fifteen, the crows would squawk and the customers would become uneasy. They even tried not opening until eight-thirty, but still about fifteen minutes into the service the oily black birds squawked.

  Reservations were canceled, diners left without dessert. Sometimes customers came in and changed their minds and left. Esperanza sometimes heard them mention “La Mulata.” There was another restaurant at the end of the block.

  What did the crows want? Why did they come to his paladar? Just like Segundo’s team, they lined up every night, waiting for customers that didn’t come. So it wasn’t the customers that drew them.

  Segundo consulted with Adé, who just smiled and nodded. Then Segundo handed him a rolled wad of twenty-one peso notes. Adé offered to slaughter a dove in the dining room in the presence of the crows, but since this might also be in the presence of customers and he did not think that Yumas would be understanding, he declined this offer. Adé shoved the bills into the pocket of his baggy Romanian blue jeans and winked. What would he do?

  Miguelito, whose gods were not African, consulted with the government. He was informed that Segundo was not allowed to harm the crows. However, they did furnish him with a piece of equipment, a crow repeller. A green government truck delivered this machine and it looked like it had been left over from Soviet times, which is to say that it was very large, it was made of blackened steel, and it looked like the perforated barrels of several large-caliber machine guns stacked vertically and sprouting metal wings at several heights. When plugged in—another drain on electricity—it emitted a sound like the creak of a rusty door hinge, but one continuous creak. The crows didn’t mind it, but the customers did, driving the few he still had away.

  After two weeks the only customer at the Paladar de Cornejas Cubanas was Miguelito, and his patronage also seemed uncertain—not that he paid for anything, anyway. The Paladar de La Mulata down the street was so busy that reservations had to be made at least a week in advance. One day La Mulata was leaving Adé’s and ran into Miguelito on the narrow street and smiled and winked at him exactly the way she had twenty-five years earlier. “You should eat at my restaurant. I have the best chicken in Havana.”

  “I don’t eat chicken.”

  “What do you eat? I can make it for you.”

  “I only eat caviar.”

  She smiled and stared at him. Her nose was almost touching his. He could see the dried, folding skin under her brave chin. She whispered, “I will serve you caviar on my naked breasts and you can lick it up all night, one egg at a time.”

  “Actually,” he said awkwardly, “I prefer it just on a plate.”

  * * *

  The Cuban crows left the paladar, whose name was changed to Paladar de Esperanza. Soon reservations needed to be made a week in advance. The crows perched instead on the broken balcony over the entrance to the Paladar de La Mulata, which made people hesitate to enter, even if they did have reservations. Her one loyal customer was Miguelito, who dined on caviar in her living room restaurant every night. Segundo could not help laughing. It was Miguelito. For some reason the crows followed him.

  One night—one of those lonely nights with a starless sky and fog meandering in from the harbor—as she brought him his caviar in an otherwise empty living room she said, “Listen, Miguel.”

  And he did, because no one had called him that in a very long time. “Miguel, why don’t you come upstairs with me.”

  Miguelito nodded and she climbed the stairs and he followed, placing his hands, fingers spread wide, on the globes of her celebrated mulata ass, which he had been wanting to do most of his life.

  The birds outside started squawking, but Miguelito and the Mulata didn’t care. Alone at last with their goal in view, the birds flew in and glided onto the little table in the living room, standing in a circle around the plate of caviar. After some small disputes about who got to stand where, they took turns pecking at the glowing coral-colored eggs on the plate one by one. The entire murder ate.

  GLOUCESTER

  The Science of Happiness in North Shore Frogs

  But there is trouble in store for anyone who surrenders to the temptation of mistaking an elegant hypothesis for a certainty.

  —Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

  Frogs are not really happy,” explained Doktor Grete Adlgasser, Opal’s mother, who knew these things. “People think they are happy because they look like they are smiling. But that is just the shape of their mouth so that they can uncoil their tongue very rapidly to catch flies.”

  “Why do they catch flies?” Opal asked.

  “That is their food,” her mother explained.

  “So when they get one, it must make them happy,” said Opal triumphantly. For a second she felt as though she had won.

  But of course she never wins, and her mother answered, “It doesn’t make them want to smile.” Her father, Herr Doktor Heinz Adlgasser, concurred. “Why would a frog smile?” The idea seemed to make him smile, and Opal was pretty sure this wasn’t just to catch flies.

  Opal’s parents were always right. It was an established fact. Her mother was a biologist and her father a physicist. Her mother taught at Harvard in a building Opal liked to visit only because they had most every kind of flower reproduced in glass standing in bloom forever delicate as the real ones. She didn’t visit her father at MIT.

  They were both famous. Her father, who championed string theory, had won a Nobel Prize for his work on the slowing of time for muons in motion. He had explained this many times to Opal, but she didn’t understand it and didn’t want it explained again.

  In the summer they left Boston for their hundred-year-old stone house with colored glass windows like a church in the woods on the North Shore. It was a good place to be in the summer. As soon as you left Boston, or at least when you got past tough and grimy Chelsea, the world turned green and wooded and seemed to be filled with ever more wildlife, as though they had come
from wilder parts of New England to summer in the North Shore just like Bostonians. There were more and more rabbits, brave little animals that dared to come out because the grass in the fields was so good to eat. Opal loved the rabbits, but they were too quick and they ran when they saw her. There were also black bears and coyotes, which Opal’s mother said had come to eat the rabbits. Opal’s mother had reduced biology to who eats and who is eaten. Opal never saw a bear or a coyote, but sometimes she would hear strange high-pitched dog howls and she hoped the rabbits heard them, too, and knew where to hide.

  In addition to the bears, coyotes, and rabbits, the Adlgassers’ friends were drawn to the North Shore in the summertime. Some were men like Franz Heidler, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work with nucleic-acid proteins and came all the way from New York. Some were women like Erna Hoff, who had possibly proven or disproven something about quarks. Erna liked Opal and thought of herself as someone who liked children, though she had none of her own. With an arm around her—which made Opal nervous—she explained to Opal all about quarks, how it was a particle with a strong force; how there were six different kinds; how they came in red, green, and blue; and how her concern was the blue. Opal nodded politely but in truth had no idea what a quark was other than it being something they all liked to argue about.

  And there was Berndt Kaidel, who worked on special relativity in quantum mechanics and was on the threshold of proving Einstein wrong about the constancy of the speed of light, except that a man in Finland claimed he had already disproven Kaidel.

  A great deal of their discussions were about Kaidel’s theory, which Opal didn’t understand any better than quarks. Her parents and their friends would probably be shocked to know that she didn’t even understand Einstein’s theory, let alone Kaidel’s argument against it or the Finnish argument against Kaidel.

  The scientists never brought their spouses unless they, too, were German scientists. They were all German scientists from good German families that had fled the bad Germans, except that there were always rumors about eighty-five-year-old Heidler. They sat comfortably in the thick upholstered furniture in the dark-wood living room and discussed the speed of light while sipping expensive imported fruity wine from long, slim, green bottles.

  The only nonscientist in the house was Opal. She was eleven years old. It was assumed that eventually she would be a scientist, too. She never argued with this, but she found it hard to believe because though they were all speaking English, she could not understand anything they said. And they never gave her a taste of their wine, either.

  She wondered why they always spoke English, since they were all German. The only German she ever heard was between her parents when they were talking about her. She knew this, first of all because she kept hearing the word “Opal,” which seemed to her a ridiculous misstep for people who were always described as “brilliant.” But also, she didn’t tell them, but she could understand some German.

  Opal spent her summer in the pool. She had eight bathing suits so that there was always a dry one. Some were one-piece, some two-, different cuts and shapes, but they were all one hue or another of green. She insisted on that.

  The pool was in a shady gardened area with tall twisting trees and winding vines. When she first walked out, the frogs could see that it was she and they were always glad to see her. They were smiling. As she came closer it was harder for them to make her out, but they followed with their eyes and they knew that Opal had come. One would float toward her, showing only his eyes above the water.

  Sometimes she would hear a coyote in the distance; sometimes she would see the last white fluffy trace of a grazing rabbit. Sometimes, especially later in the day, she would see a raven circling overhead. Her mother said that the raven was just waiting for something to die and then he would call his friends. Opal asked if he would hurt the frogs and she just shrugged, which was a Germanic “maybe.” But the raven would leave when she came, which might have been another reason why the frogs smiled and were happy to see her.

  She would swim the length of the pool with one of the frogs. They were strong, fast swimmers, but she was a lot longer, so she could keep up with a frog.

  Once on the other side the frog would stretch out his arms and legs and float, keeping just his eyes out of the water. Sometimes Opal would reach from underneath, palm-up, and lift the frog out of the water. He was not worried. He would let her do it. The frog felt so small but powerful in her hand—like something concentrated and vibrating with life. It was a good feeling.

  One day after she had tried to listen to Erna Hoff try again to explain quarks to her, she wandered sadly to the pool and looked at the frogs. There were two. Sometimes there were three or four, sometimes only one, but this day there were two—both smiling at her.

  Suddenly she remembered all the stories from her childhood—“and then the princess kissed the frog . . .”

  He wouldn’t have to be a prince. After all, she wasn’t a princess. But she just wanted a boy she could go out to the pool to talk with and escape the quarks. Would it work? She could try. She slipped into the water in her green two-piece and waded over to the resting frog, slipped her hand below and scooped gently upward until the frog, green and shiny and coiled with energy, stood, knees bent, in her palm.

  She looked closely at it, trying to determine if it was male or female. She would have to ask her mother sometime how to tell. If it turned out to be a girl to talk to that would be fine, too. But maybe it would work only with a boy? Or was that the kind of prejudiced thinking she had learned to reject in her school in Boston?

  She brought her hand to her face and pursed her lips and kissed the frog on the lips. Its lips felt hard against hers. But it did not even move, didn’t jump away, just crouched in her hand and smiled. Nothing else happened. She wondered how much time this would take.

  * * *

  The next morning Opal was anxious to get to the pool. She noticed while brushing her teeth that she was looking very pale and she worried that her mother would think she was sick and not let her go to the pool. But no one really noticed her at breakfast. They were arguing Einstein. Kaidel pointed out, “Einstein never called it relativity, he called it invariance.”

  “Never, Berndt?” Opal’s mother questioned.

  “Don’t you see, dat vas de mistake. Invariance and relativity are not za zame sing.”

  Opal slipped away to the pool. She really was very pale-looking, but fortunately no one noticed. In fact, as she stepped into the water her legs started looking so pale they were almost greenish. There were three frogs in the pool and a fourth under a broad leaf at the edge of the pool area. She was certain that one of them had to be the one she had kissed and yet there was no sign of “metamorphosis.” In her mind she pronounced the word with a German accent to sound more scientific. This was her experiment. She might even start to keep a log the way scientists do.

  Days went by and still all the frogs remained frogs—exactly the same. Her color still didn’t look good, she was more greenish than ever, but her parents still had not noticed. They were busy with “the quarks,” as Opal increasingly referred to their guests.

  Then one day on the steps as she was about to leave the pool she did a deep knee bend and leapt out of the pool in a way she had never done before, landing on the tiles with a strange slapping sound. She looked down and saw that her feet were more than twice as long as they used to be and her long toes were all connected. She had webbed feet.

  What had she done? She was frightened. She’d better go show her mother.

  It was hard to walk now. Her big flat feet were making sucking and slapping noises as she walked into the house. Opal knew she could get there more efficiently by jumping, but this was a little disturbing and she did not want everyone’s attention.

  “Dis is nonsense,” said Heidler, the energetic octogenarian, the fuzzy white crown around his shining bald head sha
king so that he looked like a symphony conductor in the throes of Beethoven. “You biologists always talking about what is and isn’t hardwired. There are no choices. The physical world shows us this. If you take acetone peroxide and you add heat you get a big boom. It will explode every time. It does not decide to explode.”

  “Yes,” said Opal’s mother with forbearance. “But with animals there is an element of choice, just like human beings have choice. We don’t know how much choice an animal has.”

  “You know what Nietzsche said, Grete? We invented choice so we could have guilt!”

  But suddenly Grete shrieked, “Opal!”

  Finally she noticed, Opal thought.

  “Opal,” shouted Grete. “You are tracking water all over the living room!” She ran into the hallway closet and came back with Opal’s turquoise-and-white rubber beach thongs. “Here, put these on.”

  How does she imagine this will work? thought Opal. Just look at these feet. You are confronted mit ein physical impossibility, Opal thought to herself in her mock German accent.

  But Grete slipped them on and they fit the same as always, and a confounded Opal just walked out of the room as the quarks continued their discussion.

  Every day Opal looked more like a frog, but no one noticed, no one except the frogs, who smiled more every time they saw her. For a while she was afraid that it was a mocking smile, but frogs are very welcoming and she could swim with them and jump with them and even take her turn grabbing flies because she now had a long, sticky tongue that unfurled from the front of her mouth, making talking almost impossible. What did it matter? She had no one with whom to talk, anyway. She learned to croak and often exchanged croaks, both the deep ones and the higher-pitched one. She would float on her belly in the pool with only her bulging eyes breaking the surface. Sometimes she would hop right through the living room, but the quarks never noticed.