The Butcherbird Stories Page 7

  Conrad said, “I don’t care about that. You ran away. Of course you did.” One of his books was open on his lap. His eyes had not left its pages and he looked as if he were reading his responses. “You didn’t come back. You didn’t bring help.”

  The train wasn’t going to reach its destination until the next morning. They sat on opposite sides of the cabin looking out the window. It became so dark outside that they could see only their reflections. Conrad got another book from his luggage. He didn’t turn the pages of this one either.

  Bruno closed his eyes and let the train rock him into dozes. He woke with a start whenever the train shuddered. The train stopped at a station that wasn’t much more than a platform. No-one got off the train and no-one got on. There was an empty wooden structure, tall and narrow—a ticket booth. A sign over its doorway told Bruno this was Carthage station. Conrad didn’t look outside the window or appear to notice that the train had stopped.

  It was dark. From what Bruno could see, there weren’t any roads in Carthage, let alone buildings. A stand of tall trees was all that was there, leaves unbothered by wind in the glow of the station’s one lamppost.

  Insects bumped around blindly in that small sphere of light outside the window. Bruno thought those bugs should be sleeping yet the light at Carthage station dragged them from their insect sleep and forced them into a somnambulist’s hell of eternal wandering. They didn’t live longer than a few days. Under the spell of that gaslight salvation, one night was an entire world for them—perpetually about to come alive in a false dawn that lasted most of their brief lives.

  “I came back.” Bruno couldn’t look at Conrad so he stared at the meaningless sign outside their window and those bewildered insects. “It wasn’t easy. I was so scared I couldn’t think. I should have gone straight home and told your uncle. But I came back to the cottage.” The train vibrated and its engines rumbled for a minute— then shuddered and returned to silence.

  Bruno’s legs were jittery with adrenaline and he wanted to run but all he could do was sit in the motionless train. He said, “I heard you. I could tell by the way you were wailing that he wasn’t around. The sound—going on as if nothing could help it or stop it. I couldn’t move for the longest time.”

  The train’s lights flickered and Bruno worried they would die and leave the two of them in total darkness. Bruno said, “It was a hollow sound and I knew it had to be coming from that man’s well. I lowered the rope down the hole and I whispered though I suppose you couldn’t hear me over that noise you were making. I got so worried he would catch me whispering or that he would come out because you were making that noise.”

  Conrad began to move as he listened, his hands rubbing at his eyes and cheeks as if he were washing his face. He was silent and Bruno wasn’t sure if his friend could hear him.

  “I looked up and there he was, sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, in the shadows. I could hear that explosion like we heard earlier. I was still standing there and I suppose I imagined the sound of his rifle. The silence went on and I started breathing again. He didn’t move and I realised as I blinked at him that he wasn’t watching and waiting. He was asleep in his rocking chair.”

  Conrad said, “That’s why I was in the well. He said he was going to put me down as he would a dog, but he was waiting. Waiting in ambush for you to come back for me. And then he fell asleep.” Conrad stopped washing his face with his dry hands and tilted his head up so he could look at his best friend. “He was a lot older and weaker than he seemed standing on his porch with that rifle. The hunting knife we were going to use at the lake was just sitting there on his porch and it wasn’t much harder than how we’d imagined killing ducks.”

  The engines began turning again. Bruno had sharpened the knife for half an hour on the whetstone in Winfried’s kitchen on the morning they’d set out for the lake. After a few more moments the train jolted into motion.

  Bruno looked out at Carthage station and noticed a large bird sitting in one of the trees. It was far enough away from the light not to be illuminated. Its head moved as the locomotive came to life again. The creature was the size of large baby or a small boy sitting on a branch. A huge bird, really, and not too far away. A flash from its large eyes made Bruno realise it was an owl and it stunned him that it had been sitting there the entire time the train was halted without him or his best friend noticing. A flash in the darkness as though from the bottom of Mr Macht’s well.

  Faramond wasn’t the same horse since the day they’d ridden to the river. His exertions had broken him and he now wheezed simply standing in his stall. Bruno often didn’t go back into the house after he’d tended to Faramond, as today when he chose instead to sit on a stool with his chessboard on the anvil.

  His father-in-law came out and lit a cigar he’d received for his last birthday. He used to have one every Sunday evening but hadn’t been able to afford the habit since his property investments began failing.

  “What’s the special occasion, old man?” asked Bruno without looking up.

  “I’ve told you more than once I don’t want to be called that.” Ernst’s voice was commanding. Bruno continued to contemplate the chessboard. “What’s the point of playing yourself?” Ernst asked.

  “Playing myself? Are you already going senile?”

  “Senile?” Ernst was standing in the wide doorway. He looked back at the house as though it had been a bad idea to come to the barn. It hadn’t been his idea, of course. The family wanted Ernst to see if he could work out why Bruno spent so many hours in the barn these days. “I’m trying to tell you it’s pointless to sit out here in the barn playing yourself in chess. Is there anything senile about that?”

  “Have you not heard of a chess problem? They publish a new composition in the newspapers every week.”

  “Of course I’ve seen them but I’ve never understood the point. Chess played among gentlemen can be a noble game. This seems to turn it all into a silly puzzle.”

  Bruno didn’t look up from the board. “Maybe you’re simple then, if not senile.”

  “Simple? That’s rich, coming from you of all people. Perhaps you might enlighten me, Mr Kramzer.” Ernst had no doubt his usually tongue-tied son-in-law would be unable to do any such thing.

  Bruno lifted his head for the first time and looked at the self-styled patriarch. “You begin with confusion. The solution can only be found when that confusion is cleared away. What is revealed is a singular, clear idea. The one possible action, economical in the extreme. Elegance is what is left when all excess and confusion have been cleared away from an action.”

  Ernst felt himself about to erupt into a tirade. They’d been devastatingly effective with the members of his family in the past. And yet he couldn’t speak from rage. He blinked, swallowed and breathed. He was capable of doing nothing else for a few moments.

  He realised in his own inexplicable silence that he was dependent on Bruno. Just a year ago, he’d had money in his properties that gave him an income. Somehow, what had been merely a convenient living arrangement had become a necessity without him noticing the transition. He’d spent a long time silently fuming about his sacrifice of cigars and now found it hard to breathe.

  “I see there’s more to it than I thought.”

  It was the first back step he’d ever taken in the many years he’d known Bruno Kramzer. His very last cigar was burning without him smoking it, so he concentrated on not wasting any more of the fine tobacco. He moved out of the barn and sat heavily on the bench beside the doorway.

  A few moments later Bruno came out and sat on the bench with him. He asked to share the cigar and Ernst extended it to his son-in-law after a brief hesitation.

  “I’ve been thinking about Jonah.”

  “Do I know him?”

  Bruno laughed as he took the fuming cigar. “You go to church every Sunday.”

  “We all go. The whole family wishes you would come. Your soul is always in our prayers.”

  “
Enough of that. Let’s get back to Jonah.”

  “Jonah and the Whale? Matthew and Luke both mention him …”

  “I’m still not interested in your religion but I wanted to clarify the story. I was struck by the line where Jonah says to God that he’s angry with Him. God tries to explain. Jonah is unappeased and responds, ‘I am greatly angry, even unto death.’” Bruno puffed on the cigar. He seemed to enjoy it yet Ernst had never known him to be a smoker.

  “I’m not sure what you want me to say,” said Ernst.

  “Why is Jonah angry?” Ernst reached out a hand for his cigar but Bruno was distracted by the direction of his thoughts and didn’t notice. “He is asked by God to go to a city and tell them they are all going to die. The citizens of Nineveh know Jonah’s speaking the truth. The king makes public repentance, severe and sincere, and the good people of his kingdom all follow suit, changing their evil ways. God changes His mind about killing them all. Jonah is angry because his prophecy was overturned. All those people were not killed, so he’s furious with his God.”

  “I still don’t know where you’re going with this.” Ernst was watching the cigar being waved around in the air with every sentence of his son-in-law’s absurd interpretation of a blessed story.

  “At the beginning of the parable, Jonah refused to go to Nineveh with the bad news. Instead he set sail across the sea. Storms rose out of the blue and the ship was quickly in deep trouble. The sailors started throwing everything overboard despite Jonah confessing that he was the cause of the storm. They were forced to throw him overboard, and the sea was miraculously calmed once more. The whale swallowed Jonah so that he wouldn’t drown and could be transported to Nineveh.”

  “The sailors on the boat refusing to throw him overboard until the last moment were men of charity and faith,” suggested Ernst.

  “It was harder for me to believe in those conscientious sailors than most of the nonsense in your Good Book and yet I find myself continuing to contemplate this story. Not that all of it makes sense to me. The man wants to do nothing but go his own way, even if that leads him to the bottom of the ocean. And then he’s swallowed by something much larger than himself and is set off in a new direction. Which in Jonah’s case is horrific—the annihilation of a whole city. Despite that, he’s furious that he’s unable to see his prophecy come to pass. Everyone only ever remembers that part about the whale. Isn’t it more interesting that this prophet says to God that he is angry with Him ‘unto death’?”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Ernst. “I can’t say the moral is clear to me either.”

  “Perhaps it’s this: Jonah understands in the moment he is angered ‘unto death’ that he is just a piece in a game that means nothing to Jonah himself. That he’s a knight or a rook in a chess problem that God is trying to solve. Jonah’s fury is the realisation that he has no value beyond the game.”

  “I don’t think God plays games,” said Ernst.

  Bruno looked at the cigar and grimaced. He crushed it on the bench between him and his father-in-law.

  Back in the barn, he found it difficult to return to his chess problem. He sat at the anvil, gazing at the pieces without considering their potential movements or the knot of circumstance that bound them to their squares.

  He listened to the wheeze and shuffle of his horse. When Ernst returned to the house Bruno stood up and walked over to Faramond’s stall to brush him again—to urge him to eat or drink. As was usual now, he barely opened his mouth for nourishment. Bruno could only stroke the animal’s forehead and nose, whispering the same useless word into his ear again and again, and then returned to the chessboard on top of the anvil.

  “I’ve seen this kind of thing before. From a much better artist in Prague. One with skill, with actual genius. I’m not sure what to call this. Is it mediocrity or thievery— can anyone tell me?”

  Asking the people in the gallery was going a bit far. Bruno was meant to be a respectable businessman attending the opening night of an exhibition. If he came off as a rabble-rouser the effect would be spoiled; the action would fail.

  Whether the artist, Gert Knab, was good at what he did, Bruno had no idea. He was attracted to the pictures in a way he could not have explained. He had been hoping he would hate the show so he could do his job with sincerity for once. Knab was wearing a suit that looked as though it had been handed down from his grandfather. He was very tall with a large moustache overgrowing his mouth, and of a very pale complexion. His cheeks were reddening quickly as he looked over to Bruno.

  Bruno was given small change such as this while his partner was recuperating. Small change was the kind of action a person might safely accomplish alone. His employers had asked him if he wanted to be given a new partner, because there was no saying whether Rainer would come back with a taste for the job. Attrition in their line of work was high. Rogues often became cowed by events such as they had experienced in the principal’s office. They went on trying to do the job but dwindled in effectiveness, becoming gnats instead. Bruno wondered if that’s all he was really capable of, being gnat-like. Bruno had told his superiors that he had no doubt Rainer would come back with more brio than ever.

  After Bruno spoke, he shook his head and shut his mouth in a grimace. He then nodded at the other guests of the gallery with a forefinger on his lips. He would make an effort to be civil. “Sorry,” he mouthed, and moved on, to the next painting on the wall, and the next, without further comment. He continued to look displeased.

  Bruno could feel Knab’s tension, as the artist waited for some further comment from the man stamping around in heavy boots, in a room that had quietened with the expectation of another outburst.

  Bruno stopped before a painting and for a moment forgot that he was here for a job. He had never been to a gallery before. He didn’t possess the kind of clothes necessary to gain admittance at the door of an establishment as high-class as the Milkweed & Silk gallery. Today he had been dressed at the offices. They’d trimmed his hair and rubbed special oil through it, cut his beard and shaved his face. They’d brushed his teeth with a paste that tasted poisonous.

  He looked unrecognisable in the reflections he’d caught of himself in the evening windows in the streets of the town centre. He’d appeared an authentic gentleman. He’d been warmly welcomed at the doors of Milkweed & Silk. It made the action easier yet he had forgotten all that and his mouth hung open like a peasant’s.

  Bruno wasn’t of the right society and didn’t have the money to pursue it, but he did enjoy art. The paintings on his walls at home were all bought at local markets. There was a way paintings made him look at the world afterwards that was rewarding. He became more aware of the details and his sense of beauty was also improved. The world so often took on a trivial sameness and brutal ugliness. A picture of a platter of fruit could capture the passing sweetness and imminent decay of things.

  The painting before him now was entirely dissimilar to what Bruno might have found at his markets. For one thing it was made of red blockish shapes that yet resembled a man’s head and shoulders. It looked at once childlike and sophisticated. The distortion made Bruno look all the harder at the picture. There was no facial expression he could divine through the shades of red in the fragments and pieces which nevertheless still communicated something. Bruno wasn’t sure what. The eyes were overly large, one far wider than the other. The second eye almost closed. Had the man been beaten? His mouth was twisted about in a way that didn’t make sense. It was portrayed from different perspectives. It certainly might have been torn from the kind of damage he’d seen kicks to the face produce. When Bruno stepped back he saw that the painting was called Head with Moustache. He could barely detect the moustache. The shapes above the figure’s head resembled horns to Bruno and he was surprised by how subtly this devil crept into the image. Also, how obvious it was now that he’d noticed it.

  “I know you,” the man next to Bruno said. “I recognised your voice before, when you spoke. We’ve met, haven
’t we? I’m not sure where, but it wasn’t too long ago. My name’s Karlis.”

  Bruno said, “Well, if you’ve been to New York recently, then perhaps we’ve met. I haven’t been in this neck of the woods for years.”

  Karlis offered his left hand. Bruno pretended he hadn’t noticed. He stepped away from the businessman who had lost part of his right arm in the circus bear fiasco. Bruno had done a lot of shouting, telling people to leave the room and trying to rouse the prone man to slowly crawl away from the frightened beast—which the wounded Karlis did manage to do in the end, though it was gruesome progress on elbows and knees.

  “No, I have never been to America. I’m sure I know that sibilant S of yours.” The businessman followed Bruno along the wall to the next painting, chatting pleasantly. “My father stuttered badly, and I’ve always found speech impediments fascinating. With my father, the stutter disappeared when he got angry or when he was singing. With you that sibilance is worse when you raise your voice, and now it’s almost not even there. Still detectable, of course. Say something else.”

  Bruno gave Karlis his profile as he pretended to look at the next painting on the wall. “You’re being rude. I’ll slap you and you’ll feel the S in that word without a doubt.”

  Bruno turned and waved a waitress over. She was carrying a tray of champagne in small saucer glasses. He picked one up and turned away from the businessman, lifting his face from the man’s gaze, knowing that he was being evasive and it would only confirm Karlis’s suspicion. Bruno clipped the waitress’s tray with his elbow and managed to spill the drinks to the floor, meanwhile raising his voice over the crashing glass.

  “As though it was not bad enough being insulted by the garbage on these walls, now I am physically assaulted as well. One insult on top of the other.”

  Bruno knew his impersonation of an outraged gentleman was quite good. He was about to storm out of the gallery, whether the client thought the showing was sufficiently disrupted or not, when the artist took a few strides with his long legs to stand before him. Knab took hold of the lapels of Bruno’s expensive jacket. Knab turned Bruno around to face the waitress. The young woman looked distraught at being the centre of the room’s attention and the cause of such a disturbance.