The receiving clerk narrowly inspected cage and bird. The cage’s round bottom, dark with age, bore the traces of stickers and stamps: the parrot had evidently wandered for a long time, changing hotels and countries, before its cage wound up in this cage. The look of the parrot, sulking behind its bars, said as much: yes, for a very long time. Its curved beak was tucked disgustedly inside its bristly collar of blue-gray hackles, while the cloudy sheaths over its eyes seemed to conceal innumerable years reflected in years.
2
One of the customs officials took an interest in the bird. But the bird took no interest in the official. He would poke a finger in a thick wedding band between the bars, trying to get the parrot’s attention. The parrot, barely opening its sheaths, would squint unconcernedly and sidle away from the finger along its perch.
Since a prisoner must be fed, the official suggested moving the cage from storage to his apartment. He must have been guided by a vague association: his young wife, whom he had lately brought from Petersburg to this hinterland on the border, was a musician, and since the parrot had revealed a familiarity with the works of Rouget de Lisle,* then . . . The cage was installed in a corner of the tiny parlor, three steps from the piano with a plaster Beethoven above the black varnish and the music rack.
The official was busy from morning till evening at work. His wife, left alone all day, would play through her old sheet music, write letters to her Petersburg friends, and listen to the whistles of passing trains. Come evening her husband would return and recount the customhouse news. Sometimes he brought colleagues. The colleagues would first ask her to play something, and then, smiling politely, sit down to a game of cards, followed by “whatever was on hand.” On hand there was always vodka and cold appetizers. After dinner the flushed guests would surround the parrot in its cage and, tapping on the bars, plead with affectionate insistence: “Give us the ‘Marseillaise’, Polly. You can sing it now—it’s just us. Come on, pretty Poll, come on—Allons enfants . . . Sing it, please?”
But the bird, turning its beak away in disdain, would respond with silence or a short angry squawk.
Sighing, the guests would exchange a few bits of customhouse gossip, then wish each other goodnight and go home. But the parrot, evidently, had other ideas about the night. One time, husband and wife were awakened by a high sharp whistle. The husband, still half asleep, swung his feet to the floor and sprang up, but his wife caught him by the arm: “Shhh!” Filtering out of the next room, like a fine acoustic thread, were the first adagio bars of Beethoven’s Appassionata.*
The wife, in bare feet, so as not to frighten the adagio, crept to the door and set it ajar. Through the darkness the hazy cage took form: the bird was singing softly, as if to itself, exactly observing the melody’s meter, sorrow, and syncopations.
Next morning, left alone as usual with the cage, the wife opened it and tried to stroke the bird. The parrot bristled up its wings and bit her finger.
3
The wind of war whisked the borders away, then swept up drifts from east and west of gray and blue, then whirled them in blue-gray maelstroms of battle. The border officials, finding themselves without borders, had to quickly evacuate. But to the east all the railways were blocked up with red boxcars, while to the west the sky was crashing down in cannonades. There was no time for cages or pianos—could one but escape with one’s life. The parrot half-opened its round pearly eyes at the nearby sound of German speech and the protracted nasal stutterings of a field telephone. Boot soles hurried in the door and out the door. No one bothered about the white Beethoven, the bird, or the keyboard under its lowered lid. The parrot, already sinking into its habitual semi-somnolence, was awakened only once or twice by the resounding tread of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,”* banging like tusks on the keys. The chatter of machine guns at first receded to the east, then it seemed their chattering flock was flying swiftly back. The telephones’ stutterings became shorter and faster. Then abruptly broke off. Hush.
4
Staff Captain Kopilka was shouldering thirty-seven years of life, eight brass stars, a wife, and three children. The peacetime path to two solid stripes on one’s insignia was hopelessly long and tedious. A drum rapping out the days, months, years, deductions, card debts, “this and that”—as Staff Captain Kopilka himself put it. But now, at least, you see, it was either corpse or colonel, and a colonel without any allegories. Kopilka was bundled into the complicated cross straps of a field belt and exported to the front. His wife, a rosy-cheeked woman with auburn hair, began to receive neatly numbered letters from the war. Then one frost-flecked morning in October the bell rang and in the doorway appeared a merrily grinning soldier: “From his Honor.” From his left cuff he produced a numbered envelope, while under his left wrist swung a round cage with a gaudy gray bird inside: “Present for the little ones, ma’am.” The bird received a grand welcome. The children, two little boys, themselves like long-legged wading birds, and a quiet wide-eyed little girl, first hoisted the cage onto the stove so as to warm the bird up, and then, at their mother’s shrieks, stood it in the middle of the nursery and kicked up their six heels in a merry dance round the parrot. The parrot, barely opening its eyes, intoned: “Halt.”1 And, after a pause: “Feuer!”2 The effect was tremendous, but the children, who ran to their mother for an explanation, could not make the parrot repeat the words. They decided that its stay on the battle lines had rendered the bird temporarily deaf, but that later it would begin to talk.
The parrot, having come from there, was the object of ceaseless solicitudes: they fed it sugar and ants’ eggs. They spoke to it as to a friend, calling it by the most affectionate names. But the impolite bird always turned away in silence.
The letters, too, fell silent for some reason. One of the numbers, annoyingly, had gotten stuck somewhere a thousand versts* away. After that, instead of a letter, a telegram arrived: a scant two lines. First trembling fingers fumbled with the folded slip of paper, then eyes once—again—and yet again—and then a cry that drew out the terrible “i”: “They k-i-i-lled him!” Instantly the apartment filled with strangers. The children hid in the corner like a small frightened flock, while their mother, teeth knocking against her splashing glass, said over and over, softly and monotonously, as if learning a difficult foreign phrase by rote: “They k-i-i-lled him, they k-i-i-lled him . . .”
A week went by—another week—a month. The grass of oblivion likes to be watered with tears: this helps it to grow. The strangers, having sympathized, were already sympathizing elsewhere (in wartime the demand for sympathy exceeds supply), but one of the strangers had turned—this somehow always happens—from a stranger into an intimate. His main advantage over Kopilka was not that his mustache was redder and stiffer, but that he was not a corpse.
At any rate, why shouldn’t the two of them go to the cinema sometimes, or to that Caucasian wine cellar around the corner; the wine cellar had private booths. The tear-off calendar on the dining room wall was replaced; the dressmaker called in for consultation found that the color best suited to auburn hair was white. The wedding preparations were not long, not troublesome: nothing could be gotten hold of—idiotic war—high prices. The parrot was entirely forgotten. The children too—somewhat. However, when the festive day came, the bows under their chins were of pale blue silk. And one more “however”: the festivities were kept to a minimum, as was proper. Elderly Father Joachim, invited “for a bite of supper” with a few other guests, had just touched lips to wineglass, winked a blue eyelid, and was about to speak when suddenly someone in the next room set up a strident, heartrending wail. “They k-i-i-lled him!” trilled a high guttural voice. “They k-i-i-lled him!” The mystified guests rose from the table, glancing questioningly at their hosts. The bride was the color of her dress. Quick—remove the bird. The cage was whisked into the corner room, then into the kitchen, past three pairs of locked doors. But the obdurate parrot went on inconsolably: “They k-i-i-lled him!”
“They k-i-i-lled-him” was wrapped in a sheet and covered with a pillow, but it still, however dully, kept on—on that high tiresome note, with gurgles and screams, through walls and doors—pecking deep into the celebration. And again, as on that morning thrown out with the old calendar, a glass knocked against spasm-locked teeth; groom and guests bustled worriedly round the paroxysm, the children sat with their noses in their bows, while Father Joachim, patting their heads with his left palm, threw up his right sleeve, wide and black as a wing, making the sign of the cross over their pain-crinkled brows.
The new husband did not like the parrot. The children were forbidden to play with the bright-feathered bird. The cage was moved from the nursery to the kitchen, where it hung beside a flyblown blue-yellow-green-and-red image of the hellish torments awaiting sinners and the unrepentant. The print’s coloring and the bird’s plumage were strangely suited to each other. From the warm stove came blue-gray steam. Gripping the crossbar with annulated feet, the parrot would ruffle up its feathers and clean them with its curved beak. Perhaps the fistful of calories thrown off by the winter stove reminded it of those warm countries of long ago where sea and sky tried to out-blue each other, where lazy palms drowsed, dipping green finger-like leaves into the moist cataracts of monsoons. The bird, it seemed, was contemplating a return.
The cooks and maids from neighboring apartments sometimes gathered in the kitchen. Here they would discuss backstairs love affairs or gossip about the news from a dozen drawing rooms and bedrooms. Sometimes they mentioned their silent listener, the parrot. Drawing up a stool, Anfimia the cook said the “new gentleman” had snuck up to the cage when no one was around and poked Polly with a fork. “And how Pol did squeal! From the hall I come running. He went and dropped the fork. I saw him: ooh, he’ll be the death o’ that bird.”
Soon after that, either because of the cook’s whisperings, or because of the “new gentleman’s” wishes, bird and cage were presented to Father Joachim, a great lover of all kinds of curiosities.
5
A low ceiling. Whitewashed walls. Icons huddled in the corner. The cage hung above a windowsill populated with the prickly fins and protuberances of cactuses. Father Joachim introduced them to visitors as “my little family of trolls.”
However, this happened extremely rarely as the old priest lived alone and almost no one disturbed him in his quiet and shabby abode. The ceremonies and services had gradually gone to his young assistant, while Father Joachim now rarely went past the end of a certain floorboard in his small room. Under the pressure of his heels, the floorboard creaked. Father Joachim was more patient. When asked, “Reverend father, why have you begun to stoop?”—he replied, stroking his yellow-white beard, “I am bowing to death.”On a plank shelf level with the cage, neatly ranged, spine to spine, stood twenty or thirty books: Russian Pilgrim*—Journey to the Holy Land*—The Rock of Faith*—Kaigorodov’s Birds of Passage*—Notes on Fishing*—Stefan Yavorsky’s A Mournful Farewell to My Books.*
He led a quiet, unvaried life. By day through the open window came copper bursts from the belfry, the shrill voices of old women by the church porch, the occasional clatter of wheels on the cobbles. In the evening, when his rheumatism kept him from falling asleep, Father Joachim would walk it up and down the creaky floorboard and sometimes talk to the parrot. He would tell the parrot about the seven ecumenical councils,* about the three-trunked tree of Adam,* about the anchorites of the Thebaid,* the stigmata of St. Francis, and the miracles in the Pechersky Paterikon*; about a bird that hangs upside down from a branch with wings outspread* on Good Friday, about the fire that descends unseen on lamps in a Jerusalem church the night of the Resurrection,* and again about the councils, the three-branched tree, and on and on.
The parrot would stare with round indifferent eyes and scrub its beak on the bars of its cage.
Seconds like drops turn into minutes, minutes like rivulets into hours, hours like a stream into days, the tributaries of days into a channel of years. At first the priest fed the parrot hemp seeds from cone-shaped packets, then he left millet to soak in its water cup, finally he would place under its beak, and rarely at that, a coal-black crust of bread. The parrot would peck at it, turn away in disgust and hunch up to sleep. The bells cooped up in the nearby belfry cage no longer woke the parrot when they struck the familiar hours. But one day, somewhere far away, beyond the town, an unfamiliar bell, dull but rumbling, boomed out. The parrot half-opened its eyes and tilted its head. It seemed to be remembering something. Father Joachim crossed himself and pulled the shutters to. The streets were noisy at first with wheels trundling away. Then it all died down: they had come. But after a short string of days the rumbling bell from far away again boomed out, and “they” began to say: they are coming. That word, hiding in every crooked lane, stealing up to every door, sometimes appeared with ten or twenty mouths come to whisper something to Father Joachim in his impoverished cell. Even the parrot, as it stared at the shutters blocking its light, once remarked, bristling over its empty cup: “They.”
One day the small whitewashed room was visited by two peasants from the distant village of Nikonovka. They crossed themselves and sighed, then asked Father Joachim to honor them and accept their parish; their priest, they explained, had left them, a replacement had not been sent, the times were confusing and difficult, meanwhile the church stood silent, and there was no one to conduct the service.
Father Joachim promised. And soon a green railway car with smashed windows was conveying a knapsack, a priest, and a round cage. However, it didn’t so much convey as stand still: it stood still at junctions and non-junctions, large and small, at stations and stops, platforms and switch points, or in the middle of a field, no one knew why. The wind beat against the defenseless windows, while Father Joachim’s rheumatism fidgeted uneasily in his joints. But he could neither stretch his legs, nor lie down under something warm. On all sides were bodies pressed against bodies, acrid tobacco filled his nostrils, profanity his ears, champing and snores. “But when is Nikonovka?” Father Joachim kept asking. Some said, “Soon”; others said, “Not soon”; still others turned away without a word. Now the worn-out axles creaked, now the brakes struck steel with steel. At the first transfer, two bars of the cage were bent inward by the human crush, making it slightly more cramped. The parrot, whom Father Joachim had shielded from the cold with sacking wound round the cage, sometimes struck the bars with its beak, evidently to remind one of its presence.
This was a time of blundering trains and illogical routes, when wheels, turning like the earth, described epicycles* along the line of its orbit . . . The problem involving a point of departure and a point of arrival became more unsolvable than that unsolvable mathematical problem involving two points. North turned into south, and the sun sank in the east. And soon Father Joachim—confused by having to change trains, by insomnias, sidings, and engines hitched now to the front, now to the rear—didn’t understand where he was or where he was going, where Nikonovka was or where he had come from. At the end of the fourth four-hour leg he again found himself between trains: the one gone and the one not come. In heaps along the platform: people and bundles. The old man set down his knapsack, sat on top of it, wrapped his cassock more closely around him, and, pressing temple to cage, drowsed off to sleep. A winter wind sang in the wires, and then a dry prickly snow began to fall. But the sleeper only wrapped himself more and more deeply in sleep. Something juddered down the platform, feet stamped and kettles clanged together. Experiments conducted by the psychologist Maury* allow us to suppose that the clangs of tin against tin, on penetrating the sleeping brain, may easily turn into the peals of Easter bells or . . . But a brief peck through the sacking caused Father Joachim to start up and open his eyes. Standing in the station was a troop train. From its red boxcars gray broadcloth was racketing and shouting songs. Father Joachim could barely lift his knapsack, his consciousness would not unblear; after the sleep conquered there loomed, shrouding his eyes, another, unconquer
able and eternal. He trudged off, like a blind man, past the gaping holes, repeating at each: “Nikonovka-Nikonovka.” The harsh sob of an accordion from the first hole barred the way of even his voice; from the second he heard roars of laughter and words of advice: “Get in your cage, Pop, and fly away”; from the third came a swash of cold tea: “Shoo!” Then suddenly from under the sacking, from under the suppliant’s left hand, suddenly burst a staccato blast of guttural expletives; that casual splash of water had suddenly awoken the most complex zigzags of profanity; climbing from wheezes to whistles, the bird trilled faster and faster, spewing obscenities. Father Joachim dropped the cage in fright. But the boxcar’s contents spilled out of the open door, gleeful mouths grinning:
“That’s some birdie!”
“Go on, Polly, heh-heh.”
“Keep it up, don’t let us down.”
“What a Pop: all quiet under his skirt, but that bird’s mighty alert.”
“Hoist him up by his cassock, boys, and grab Polly too. We’ll take ’em on a wild ride.”
Five minutes later the boxcars had rolled off. In one of them under a sheepskin coat lay Father Joachim, while the cage, drawn up to the wood stove, displayed to the lustrous red coals a gaudy bent-beaked bird pottering grumpily about on its slender perch.
In the boxcar at first it was noisy and merry. Then forty pairs of prone heels turned toward the fire, and one heard only the clacket of the rail joints and the rasping of the wind against the walls. By the stove, eyes on the ashen coals, an orderly swayed in time to the race of wheels and seconds. The night and the wind were scudding past. Through a raised damper by the ceiling the air was gradually turning blue. All at once the car—buffers banging against buffers—stopped. The jolt and the hush made the orderly get up and, sliding the door open, poke his ears and eyes outside. Passing down the tracks was a lantern. The orderly waited for the light to come nearer before calling out: “What station is this?” “Nikonovka,” came the reply, and the lantern floated on.
Unwitting Street Page 12
