Animals Strike Curious Poses

by Elena Passarello

  Their hollow bones could fill to bursting with reservoirs of oxygen, and their gigantic breasts, nearly half their masses, could circulate that oxygen for days on little sleep and barely a morsel. Inside every hen or cock were two compasses, one that knew the sun and one that marked the humming magnetic loops that bend around our earth. Each pigeon could hear the subaudible waves of wind as it banked off distant mountains and smell the subtle changes humans carved in the land from farms to cities. When the birds flew home, they watched spires and rivers for reference.

  It wasn’t that Paris’s pigeons were speedy—they weren’t. Nor were they foolproof. The Prussians, always one goddamn step ahead, had trained hawks to hunt them midair. Or they’d capture a bird alive and send it back to Paris tied to fake, disturbing news. Not to mention the hungry rustres along the Loire, who unwittingly shot the birds down for their country stews.

  In the end, only a sixth of the pigeons brought microfilm back to the trapped. But they were all Paris had, both its public officials and its private citizens, who were all walled into the city for the coldest winter on record. And where the wayward pigeon heart warms itself by rushing home at seven hundred beats per minute, the trapped human heart keeps warm by calling to hearts that beat for it elsewhere:

  Get the stuff from the armoire, and the glass things, and anything fragile and keep them close to you. / I’m very anxious, but I’m pushing my nerves down as much as I can while you’re in there. / Give up the apartment on the Boulevard Bineau. Your wife, children, we all kiss you/ God keep you and a thousand kisses. / Espérons!

  CHER AMI

  By the second day under mortar fire, the 77th Division—or the “Lost Battalion”—was half its original size, and that half was more than half-starved. They were counting out their remaining bullets and pulling bandages off the dead to apply to the half-dead. For water, they had to crawl into eyeshot of German snipers, who fired at the first sight of khaki. This was about the time when the French, unaware of the 77th’s position, began shelling their allies.

  The planes had been no help, with their terrible aim. They threw down food and supplies within arm’s reach of nobody. One airdrop landed two crates of carrier pigeons—eight parachutes strapped to each box—right into the German camp. But you can’t blame the pilots. It was 1918, and man had only been flying for a decade.

  Around two in the afternoon, a young lieutenant named Orem ducked through the camp, a pigeon basket strapped to his back. In the box were the outfit’s last two birds, and both were hooting and nervous. Major Whittlesey had launched two other carriers the day before—each tied to a missive saying that three hundred men were still trapped, still suffering—but both of those birds had copped a packet.

  Orem’s hand slipped as he scooped a pigeon from that last box, and when that bird escaped, flew up and away from him, all that was left for the 77th was one Blue Check hen, US Army #43678. The last pigeon of the Lost Battalion. The message she’d carry was ready for her, scribbled by Whittlesey on a tiny scrap:

  WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALELL 276.4. OUR AR ILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

  They watched her take off, the message rolled into a crucial tube at her leg. She circled the whorls of artillery smoke and then settled herself on a tree just downhill from them. When both major and lieutenant threw sticks at her, she jumped to a higher branch and preened compulsively, so they threw rocks. Then the young Orem, still mortified over butterfingering that first pidge, shimmied up the tree and shook her from it.

  She got high enough that most of the Lost Battalion could see her: the able-bodied buck privates piling the dead into a makeshift wall; the three remaining medics, crazed with duty; the wounded left useless on their backs in the ravine. Anyone not hunkered into his funkhole had to watch her lifting up and away.

  And what a vertigo she must have created for the trapped and the crippled who saw her escaping. This stocky dove, this fist with wings, tamping down the contaminated air in her ascent, pushing away all that was lost and clearing a space for all that is home. A pigeon in the air, lifting out of the trench, is a gray flag of possibility, a final opportunity for the doomed to pull their heads up. A pigeon in war is a chance to keep imagining.

  Then a shell exploded underneath her, killing five men and sending the shocked bird to the ground. And that descent is the last recorded remembrance of the 77th’s last pigeon by any lasting member of the Lost Battalion. Perhaps they all turned away because they couldn’t stand to watch further, and this is why no 77th saw the moment when she relaunched her body—one eye just gone and one leg hanging by a tendon, tin tube still affixed. Nobody saw her wobble in the air toward Mobile Message Unit #9, twenty-five miles southwest, picking up speed as she flew. And since nobody saw her, no 77th doughboy could possibly imagine what was going to happen next.

  LEAPING LENA

  We don’t know who owned her, or which town in West Germany she came from. We don’t know her original name, or even if she had one. Chances are, she was just another serially numbered homer on that summer day she ignored the race route back from Munich, hung a right at Schwanberg, and flapped herself over the Iron Curtain.

  Perhaps, in the air, she dodged a few of those polyethylene luftballons stamped SVOBODA in garish red all-caps. The Free Europe Committee had launched the balloons from wheat fields at the border for most of the 1950s. When each eventually popped, it rained leaflets on communist Prague, Pilsen, Ostrava, or some red village in between:

  THIS LEAFLET

  WAS DROPPED

  FROM A BALLOON

  IT IS A MESSAGE

  FOR YOU … FROM THE

  CRUSADE FOR FREEDOM

  TAKE IT HOME

  … PLEASE READ THE

  OTHER SIDE

  But a lost West German racing pigeon is better than a red balloon, because an anonymous Czech can’t send the popped red balloon back. A pigeon, on the other hand, can fly back over the wall with a Czech citizen’s secret message—back to her coop and, soon after, to the offices of Radio Free Europe. She could then bear that Czech message to Adenauer and Ike, for Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border, coast to coast, and all the ships at sea:

  We plead with you not to slow down in the fight against Communism because communism must be destroyed […] We listen to your broadcasts […] We would like you to tell us how we can combat “Bolshevism” and the tyrannical dictatorship existing here […]

  —UNBOWED PILSEN

  They booked that pigeon a ticket to Idlewild and re-christened her, for the awaiting American public, a name with all the alveolar pulchritude of Lois Lane, Lorelei Lee, and Lolita. When Leaping Lena landed in New York, the prettiest stewardess they could find stood by her for the Times photograph. The headlines read COOS AND KUDOS TO ‘ANTI-RED’ PIGEON and IRON CURTAIN BIRD HERE ON CRUSADE and WRONG WAY PIGEON WHO CRASHED RED CURTAIN GETS BIG OVATION. A thousand captive American birds took to the sky in her honor.

  They made her a citizen and found her a hero cock to nest with. While a band played “The Iron Curtain Does Not Reach the Sky,” she posed for an ad to shill for US bonds. These were minted “Truth Dollars,” that, the CIA assured, would help America “fight the big lie.” But there is also the chance that the “big lie” was Lena herself.

  The names of her German handlers were never recorded. Her hometown, when it appears in print, is spelled three different ways. She was flying to Munich, Rhineland, or Bavaria, depending on which American paper told her story. And just as we can’t trace her origins, no one knows what happened at the end of her US tour, since the Army coop that kept all hero pigeons was dismantled soon afterward.

  But why not invent a pigeon to be a CIA pinup girl? What better bird to fight a cold war, really, than a bird of ideas? For many of us, an idea is a kind of home—to fly to, to roost in. And an idea built inside a comforting framework—a feathered friend, for example—can fly much further than a fact can. Lena gave America ideas about the desires
that might lie in the silent homes over a foreign wall (that wall an idea in and of itself). She gave Americans the idea that they stood on a home turf worth flying to, worth scaling walls for, and this told them the American-made idea of home was worth their fierce, nearly blind protection. And because of all this, they idealized that unreal German homer with the very real fact of their homegrown American cash.

  THE BAB AMR BIRD

  The two hands that hold the camera shake in the February wind. “See what you’ve done, Bashar? You’ve sent us back to the Dark Ages.”

  They film another pair of hands—the left one scribbling Arabic in blue ink on a paper scrap, and the right one holding the scrap steady to keep it from flying away:

  From the activists in Old Homs to those in Bab Amr, please tell us what you need in terms of supplies and food. God willing, we will get them to you.

  The camera swings to two more hands holding a Dexford walkie-talkie: “These only work up to one hundred meters. When one of us is out of range, we have to use the birds.”

  Then the camera zooms in on a third pair of hands pulling a gray-capped pigeon from a cloth bag. The bird sits quietly in the grip of its handler, like a hot rock held to keep warm.

  All told, there are eight hands on the gusty roof, passing their work (and that bird) back and forth. Two hands roll the paper tighter than an Alhamraa and knot a thread around it. Two hands pass the pigeon, flipped belly-up, to two more hands, which hold the rolled message against the bird’s inner leg, then use the brown thread to make five crude loops: “We wrap it around bird’s claw and then we leave the rest up to God.”

  All hands say blessings over the bird, which is now held in the same hands that wrote the message. It sits up in the cup of two palms as it would in a cozy nest, and waits for the hands to first lower its bird body, then toss it upward in a balletic alley-oop:

  “Godspeed, bird!”

  “We hope to God that this bird makes from Homs to Bab Amr!”

  “God is great!”

  “May he arrive in safety!”

  There is the sound of gunfire on the streets of Old Homs, of chanting, and of hands placed in a mouth to whistle, as the pigeon circles the roof loft once, then cuts a sharp right.

  When the video shows the bird turn, the pigeon looks as if it might keep flying forever, not stopping at Bab Amr, a few miles away, where other hands wait to catch it and tie their own captivity to its right leg. One can’t help but picture the bird flying further, to older homes. To thirty-five centuries of them, carrying thirty-five centuries of news.

  The Bab Amr bird flies over the shores of ancient Egypt, with a message from the arriving fleet. It flies over King Sargon of Akkad after his last human messenger has perished on the Aleppo road. It flies with news of Olympic triumphs and the results of chariot races on which kingdoms were wagered. It flies with false news from Saladin’s army as Richard the Lionheart’s men crouch by the city gate.

  And then the Bab Amr bird flies back to Homs, just like the first bird ever bought at market, over a millennium ago, that returned itself to its original coop. Back, as the dove sent from the Ark into the deluge to check for safety, back from the balcony where Semiramis of ancient Assyria waited, on the eve of her overthrow, for a prophecy. That prophecy came in the form of a bird and it gave her the wings to disappear.

  The second video begins some time later, with a bird in the sky. The hand that holds the camera follows the bird’s wide, high circles and captures the sounds of wind, some distant chanting and some not-so-distant explosions, which now shake the roof loft several times per minute. No hands in the frame this time, but near the camera are the same four voices on the same roof. They shout so loud, and with such vigor, it’s as if the bird has returned to them not from a mile-long journey, but a much greater distance.

  “Look, guys!”

  “Here he is! The Bab Amr bird!”

  “God is great!”

  “God is great!”

  “God is great!”

  “God is great!”

  “God is greater than you, Bashar. You’ve been sending rockets but we’ve sent this bird!”

  It will kill men, and something like panic will follow.

  Thomas Edison

  FROM THE JULY 28, 1796 edition of the Philadelphia Aurora, some of which is true:

  There has just arrived from New York, in this city, on his way to Charleston, an elephant. He possesses the Adroitness of the Beaver, the Intelligence of the Ape, and the Fidelity of the Dog. He is the largest among Quadrupeds; the earth trembles under his feet: he has the power of tearing up the largest trees, and yet is tractable to those who use him well.

  This Elephant now offered for public Exhibition is about three years, near six feet high. He is of the largest species, growing to the height of sixteen feet. He was purchased in New York for Ten Thousand Dollars.

  There is no name on record for the elephant.

  1805

  The second known elephant on the North American continent was purchased in a New York stockyard by a man named Hack. He called the animal “Bet” after his own daughter Betsy and, after realizing the elephant was no good for farm labor, he walked her from town to town, selling tickets. The ads Hack ran in local papers warned readers, this is the only one in the United States, and perhaps the last to visit this place.

  He traveled at night with his elephant, in the darkness that was early America, to avoid giving a free show. Elephant vision is notably keen in dim light.

  A farmer in Alfred, Maine, became incensed with either the elephant or Hack, depending on which report you believe. He fatally shot Bet as she headed down the road to the next town.

  1809

  English chemist Humphry Davy spent the first decade of the nineteenth century developing electric light. He placed two carbon rods close together and pushed apart their ends with an electromagnet. When battery-powered current was set to the rods, it leaped in an arc from one filament to the other, and the arc lamp discharged a harsh, intense light that was perfect for illuminating roads, streets, and promenades.

  1826

  Hack Bailey acquired two more elephants: a male, Columbus, and a female, which he named Bet yet again. By now, Hack was a little more creative in his showmanship. He taught Bet II to uncork bottles of stout and bring them to her lips. He taught her to dip her head like a genteel lady. He spread a rumor that her hide was bulletproof, which led a gang of boys in Rhode Island to shoot her with six muskets at once.

  Columbus dropped dead for unknown reasons after a show in Baltimore. Hack replaced him with a fourth elephant, gave him the same name, and proceeded like nothing had happened. Columbus II lived for twenty more years, until he fell through a rickety bridge.

  1849

  Newspaper cartoonists imagined the country, which now stretched all the way to the Pacific, as a giant and dark elephant. In their hand-drawn maps, the curve of Maine is its trunk and California its tail. Settlers who dragged themselves across the Overland Trails were said to have, in their journeys, “seen the elephant”—both the wonders and the hardships of this gigantic place, the kindnesses and the acts of obscene violence.

  1859

  As a boy, Thomas Edison pestered linemen around the railroad station where he sold papers and candy. He wanted to know how electricity moved messages over wires. A Scotsman from the Montreal Telegraph Company told young Edison to imagine the wire as a dachshund that stretched from his homeland to the south of England; one could pull his tail in Edinburgh to hear him bark in London.

  I could understand that, Edison remembered, but I never could get it through me what went through the dog or over the wire.

  1862

  The king of Siam sent a sword and a pair of royal photographs to the White House, along with a promise to soon send two adult elephants—a gesture of friendship. President Lincoln graciously refused the pair out of worry for the animals, which he was not sure the nation could care for during wartime.

  1865
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  The first elephant to be tried for a crime in America was an “Asiatic” named Old Hannibal. His notable history of violence usually ran concurrent with his periods of musth: Two men at a dock in New Orleans. An unbalanced man in Ohio.

  Old Hannibal fell in love with an elephant cow in Pittsburgh, which the circus immediately promoted: Behold the Pachyderm Romeo and Juliet! After she was sold, he stopped eating, went on a whiskey bender and killed another keeper. The trial judge acquitted Old Hannibal, saying the keeper must have mistreated him. And besides, what can you expect of a fellow whose heart has just been broken?

  His obituary appeared in the New York Times two years later, the very same week as the president’s:

  Hannibal was supposed to be about sixty years of age. He had caused the death of two keepers, and the offence cost him his tusks, which were sawn off nearly to his mouth. On one or two occasions he had taken a fancy to roam through the country unattended. He was of grave and dignified demeanor, and seldom indulged in those playful demonstrations common with the smaller and less distinguished specimens of his species. His owners gave orders that he should be interred without robbing him of any of his natural ornaments.

  1878

  In October, the Edison Electric Light Company incorporated with over a quarter million dollars of backing. For his first task, Edison applied his notoriously dogged attention to making a cheap incandescent bulb that could light a home with a softer-strength current, one more appropriate for indoors than that of an arc light. His lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, housed five dozen employees: engineers, chemists, even glassblowers. He liked to joke with the press about the materials he kept on hand—everything from an elephant’s hide to the eyeballs of a United States senator.