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发表于 2007-8-4 13:22:30 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

The Birds

Translated by John Curran Davis

ALONG CAME the yellow and thoroughly boring days of winter. A ragged, sparse and undersized cloth of snow was spread over the russet hued earth. On many of the roofs it was insufficient and they remained black or rust coloured - shingle or thatched arks concealing the smoke blackened expanses of the attics within them - black, charred cathedrals bristling with their ribs of rafters, cross-beams, and spars - the dark lungs of the winter gales. Every daybreak revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots, sprung up in the night, poking out through the night\'s gale - the black pipes of diabolical organs. Chimney-sweeps could not drive away the crows which perched in the evenings in the form of living black leaves on the branches of the trees by the church; they took off again, fluttering, only to cling again at last each to its own place on its own branch; and at daybreak they flew up in great flocks - clouds of soot, flakes of lampblack, undulating and fantastic, smearing the dull-yellow streaks of daybreak with their twinkling cawing. The days hardened in the cold and boredom like last year\'s bread loaves. They were cut with blunt knives, without appetite, in idle sleepiness.

Father no longer went out of the house. He lit the stoves, studied the eternally inscrutable essence of the fire, and savoured the salty metallic taste and smoky aroma of the winter flames - a cool caress of salamanders licking the shiny soot in the throat of the chimney. With enthusiasm in those days he carried out all the repairs in the upper reaches of the room. At all times of day he could be seen crouching at the top of a step-ladder as he tinkered with something near the ceiling, near the cornices of the high windows or around the counterweights and chains of the hanging lamps. In the manner of house painters he employed his ladder as an enormous pair of stilts, and he felt good in that bird\'s-eye perspective, in the vicinity of the ceiling\'s painted skies, arabesques and birds. He withdrew further and further from affairs of practical life. When Mother, full of worries and anxiety over his condition, tried to draw him into a conversation about business matters or the bills due at the end of the month, he listened to her distractedly, thoroughly vexed and with twitches in his absent face. He might suddenly interrupt her with an entreating gesture of the hand, in order to scurry over to a corner of the room and fix his ear to a chink in the floor, and, with the index fingers of both hands upraised, indicating the most supreme importance of the investigation - to monitor. Even then we did not yet understand the sad background to those eccentricities - the lamentable complex which was ripening in the deep.

Mother had no influence over him; he bestowed great reverence and attention upon Adela on the other hand. Her cleaning of the room was a great and important ceremony to him - one to which he never neglected to be a witness, scrutinizing each of Adela\'s manipulations with a mixture of fear and a delighted shudder. He ascribed to her every act a deeper, symbolic meaning. When the girl pushed a long-handled broom across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance. Tears flowed from his eyes at such moments, his face was choked with silent laughter, and a delighted, orgasmic spasm shook his body. His sensitivity to tickling approached madness. It was enough for Adela to point a finger at him with a motion suggesting tickling, and already he was fleeing in a wild panic through every room, fastening the doors behind him, to collapse at last on his stomach on the bed, twisting in convulsions of laughter, under the influence of the very internal vision that he could not endure. Thanks to this, Adela had an almost unbounded authority over Father.

During that time we noticed in Father for the first time a passionate interest in animals. At first it was the passion of a hunter and an artist combined; perhaps it was also a deeper, zoological liking of a creature for related and yet so different forms of life, and experimentation in the untested registers of existence. Only in a later phase did this affair take the disturbing, tangled and deeply sinful turn against nature which it is better not to bring to the light of day.

It began with the incubation of birds\' eggs.

With a great outlay of effort and expense Father obtained fertilised birds\' eggs from Hamburg, Holland, and African zoological stations, and set enormous Belgian hens to incubating them. It was a most interesting procedure for me too, that hatching out of nestlings, real anomalies of shape and colouration. It was improbable to envision in those monsters, with their enormouns, fantastic beaks which were torn wide open the moment they were born, hissing greedily with the abysses of their throats - in those salamanders with the weak, naked bodies of hunchbacks - the peacocks, pheasants, wood grouse and condors they would become. Placed in baskets, in cotton wool, this dragon brood raised up their blind and wall-eyed heads on thin necks, squawking voicelessly from their dumb throats. My father walked along the shelves in a green apron, like a gardener along his frames of cactuses, and enticed from nothingness those blind blisters pulsating with life, those infirm abdomens taking in the external world only by means of feeding, those growths of life scrabbling gropingly towards the light. During the next few weeks, while those blind buds of life were bursting into the light, the rooms became filled with colourful murmuring, the twinkling twittering of their new inhabitants. They perched on the wooden curtain pelmets and the mouldings on the wardrobes, and nested in the thicket of the tin branches and many-armed arabesques of the hanging lamps.

As Father studied his great ornithological compendiums and browsed through their colourful plates it seemed as though those newly fledged phantasms had flown out from them and filled the room with colourful fluttering, slivers of crimson and shreds of sapphire, verdigris and silver. At feeding time they comprised a coloured, surging patch on the floor, a living carpet which fell to pieces upon anyone\'s incautious entry - rent asunder into animated flowers fluttering in the air, to seat themselves at last in the upper regions of the room. A certain condor remains especially in my memory - an enormous bird with a naked neck and a face wrinkled and rank with growths. It was a lean ascetic, a Buddhist llama full of imperturbable dignity in its whole demeanour, comporting itself with the iron ceremony of its great tribe. When it sat opposite Father, motionless in its monumental posture of immemorial Egyptian pagan gods, its eye clouded over with a white film which reached from the side to the pupil, to enclose itself fully in contemplation of its dignified solitude; it appeared, with its stone hard profile, to be the elder brother of my father. The very same substance of the body, the tendons and the wrinkled hard skin, the very same dried and bony face, and those very same deep horny orbits. Even Father\'s long and thin hands, hardened into knots and with curling nails, had their analogon in the condor\'s talons. I could not resist the impression, when I saw it thus fallen asleep, that I had before me a mummy - a dried up and thereby shrunken mummy of my father. Neither do I think that my mother\'s attentions had missed this astonishing resemblance, although we we never pursued this topic. It is characteristic that the condor, in common with my father, used his chamber pot.

Not confining himself to the incubation of ever newer prototypes, my father arranged ornithological weddings in the attic; he dispatched matchmakers and tethered enticing, ardent fiancées in the attic\'s gaps and hollows; and the roof of our house, an enormous, shingle span-roof, became, in effect, a veritable bird\'s inn, a Noah\'s ark to which all kinds of feathered creature flocked from far away parts. Even long after the liquidation of the avian farm this tradition regarding our house persisted in the world of birds, and many a time during the period of the springtime migration whole hosts of cranes, pelicans, peacocks, and every kind of bird descended onto our roof.

This venture however, by and by - after its brief splendidness - took a sad turn. It soon became apparent that a translocation of Father was required, to two rooms in the attic which served as lumber-rooms. It was from there that the confused clamour of the birds\' voices now reached us in the early dawn. Those wooden boxes of attic rooms, augmented by the resonance of the expansive roof, sounded from top to bottom with noise, fluttering, crowing, hooting and gurgling. Thus Father was lost to our sight for several weeks. Only seldom would he come down to the apartment, and only then were we able to perceive that he was diminished, as though he had lost flesh and shrunk. Occasionally, through forgetfulness, he started up from his chair at table and, waving his arms like wings, let out protracted hoots while a cloud of leucoma came to his eyes. And then, embarrassed, he laughed together with us and tried to turn this incident into a joke.

On one particular occasion, Adela, during her general housework, unexpectedly appeared in Father\'s ornithological kingdom. Standing in the doorway she wrung her hands at the stench rising in the air - as well as at the heaps of excrement covering the floorboards, tables, and furniture. Quickly decisive, she opened the window and, with the aid of her long brushes, set the whole avian mass into rotation. An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings and screeches arose, in which Adela, looking like a furious Meanad enveloped in the whirling of her thyrsus, danced a dance of destruction. My father, waving his arms, tried to raise himself into the air along with his flock of birds. The winged storm-cloud thinned slowly until Adela stood alone at last on the battlefield, exhausted and breathing hard, along with my father, ready, with an air of perturbation and shame, to resign himself to every capitulation.

A moment later my father stepped down from the stairway of his dominion - a broken man, an exile king who had lost his throne and his reign.