The Butcherbird Stories Page 8

  “What? Why accost me, sir?” Bruno was surprised.

  “This poor girl is crying because of you. I want you to apologise.”

  The waitress protested that no apologies were necessary and darted through the gathered crowd.

  “Let go of the jacket, please.” Bruno would have to pay from his own pocket if it was damaged.

  “I insist on an apology.” It didn’t matter that the girl wasn’t in the room anymore.

  “That girl is what … sixteen years old? She cries over many things, great and small. Should I apologise for a world of turbulence? For the many brutes living within it, and their constant bumps and shoves, for every time her poor little toes have been stepped on?”

  Bruno jackknifed his arms down to dislodge Knab’s hold on his lapels. He looked up into the tall artist’s blood-flushed face and thought he recognised the inspiration for the red painting.

  “Should I apologise for the ineffectual posing that you’ve had the gall to decorate these walls with? All these trivial expressions of your inadequacy as a man …”

  Knab swung the hand that Bruno was waiting for. Bruno lowered his head and let the artist’s loosely made fist strike the top of his forehead—the hardest part of his skull. Bruno then stepped forward and grabbed the tall man by his shirt and thrust upwards with that same part of his head into Knab’s chin. Bruno was standing on Knab’s big feet, so the tall man fell backwards, crashing into guests before collapsing to the wooden floorboards of Milkweed & Silk.

  Bruno stooped above the artist and grabbed him by the front of his shirt, a fistful of fabric at his neck, and since the man was stunned, Bruno was able to lift him enough to bounce his head on the floorboards.

  He bent down still further and into the artist’s ear he whispered, “Wonderful art.” If he were conscious enough to take it in, Knab would have concluded that this was uttered with cruel sarcasm. “Wonderful,” he said again.

  Outside the gallery, Bruno was halted before he could take ten steps, this time by a man with a revolver. Karlis stood beside the man and was smiling. He pointed a finger at Bruno with his left hand.

  “I knew I knew you. You’re a rogue. A professional. You wheeled in my birthday cake and brought the bear instead of the naked woman I was hoping for.”

  Bruno looked at the armed man standing beside Karlis. “What do you plan on doing? Killing me because this man lost his hand?”

  The weapon was military issue and Bruno was certain that the man had recently been a soldier. If he was ordered to shoot, Bruno would feel a bullet tearing through his chest. Perversely, he wondered how that would feel, and was ready to ask the soldier to fire. He wanted the bullet to hit something vital because his fear was of a long agony that resulted in nothing but more pain and humiliation. Bruno considered stepping closer to the man’s revolver and making sure it was squarely placed to his forehead or heart.

  “I asked you a question,” Bruno said. “I can only hope not to die at the hands of a cretin.”

  “You won’t need your ears for the answer if I speak,” the soldier replied. “You’ll know it in your fuck’n bones like it’s God’s truth.”

  Karlis stepped forward and was so close to Bruno he could have kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re mistaken. I don’t want to kill you,” Karlis told Bruno. “You’re nothing more than a minion. I want to know who was responsible for sending you to my celebration.” He put his good hand on Bruno’s right shoulder and spoke as he would to a well-trained servant. “I want to hire you and send you back to my enemy. You seem very good at what you do, and I will give you whatever you ask, for the full extent of your services.”

  Bruno took his guest, Conrad Samson, out to the barn to enjoy a cigar. It had been a polite dinner and an evening of pleasant banter for the two families, despite Bruno making only the occasional remark. He had purchased the cigars yesterday for Ernst’s seventieth birthday. Bruno’s father-in-law had a few puffs but he told the two younger men he wasn’t feeling well. He explained that sometimes he had terrible indigestion following a rich dinner and a large dessert. It was so severe on occasions he worried that he was having a heart attack.

  “We’ll arrange for you to see a doctor on Monday,” said Bruno. “And happy birthday, old fellow.”

  “Thank you again for these, Bruno,” Ernst said, raising the large box of fine cigars as he entered the house.

  “It’s better to keep our loved ones away from doctors if we can help it,” said Samson when Ernst was gone. “Most of the time doctors do little good and often they do quite the opposite.” Samson exhaled cigar smoke and watched Bruno do the same.

  Bruno said, “We do what we can, don’t we—for our loved ones? Better to make sure the roof doesn’t leak than search for a solution when your ceiling begins to rot.”

  Gretchen carried out two glasses of pear-flavoured slivovitz. She smiled at them as if they were boyhood friends getting reacquainted. There was no sense of familiarity between the two men. Their smiles appeared as she approached them and dissolved when she returned to the house.

  “It’s your birthday soon as well, isn’t it?”

  Bruno nodded but found nothing to say.

  Conrad filled the silence. “I remember it was always around the time of year it starts snowing.” He drew back on his cigar. “There was cake and warm drinks by the fire and everyone’s face got red.” It wasn’t so much reminiscing as it was proof that they really had been those children.

  Conrad and Bruno were sitting on chairs outside the barn. They leaned back and blew smoke up into the air so that they didn’t need to look at each other. Their exhalations drifted above their heads in the windless evening.

  “Gretchen mentioned you used to own a business. Selling roasted nuts in town from a cart. How was that?” asked Conrad.

  “I owned a store in town for a while. Near the museum. We sold nuts. I had a few carts I sent here and there as well. We were doing well.” Bruno looked into his empty palm a moment as though he’d written a note to himself in ink. “There was a fire. I was late renewing our insurance that year. Six weeks late. The house was already paid off, thank God.” Bruno closed his hand and looked up. “I pulled a cart around for three years. To make ends meet. After our disaster.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “I had an idea that we might rebuild. Problem was I couldn’t find the same energy I had when I was building the business in the first place. Doing it all over again felt a good deal harder. Maybe because I was a good deal older as well. I got to a point where I was happy to go my own way. I spent all my time reading and playing out chess problems.” Bruno shrugged. “For a while it seemed as if I was at liberty. And now I think it was more like taking a ride in the mouth of a whale.”

  For a few minutes they listened to their children playing inside Bruno’s home. It was a pleasant noise. They’d both had a boy and a girl—similar ages, though Conrad had a girl first and then a boy. Bruno might have thought their lives had followed remarkably similar paths since they’d known each other as boys. Then again, he knew that small businessmen were common enough, and so were their failures.

  “So what do you do these days?” asked Conrad.

  “I do what you do. Whatever I can to survive.” Bruno told him.

  They looked at each other without moving for a few moments and then Conrad blinked. “I was ill recently—” taking another puff of his cigar. “I used to suffer a great deal, although I wasn’t properly aware that I was actually ill. I found it almost impossible to sleep at night, and I had terrible chest pains, but our family doctor told me my heart was fine, that I should take it easy. That was another matter altogether. I didn’t know how to rest or relax. I needed to get my head out of my work. I’d forgotten how to do that. The business was who I was and it was doing brilliantly.” He turned and glanced at the jubilant noises of children at play coming from the house. “Yet a man isn’t his work. I think you’d agree with that.”


  Samson puffed on his cigar and watched the smoke drift into the air above their heads with an intense absorption, as if words were being formed and he was keen to read them before they dispersed.

  “I went to see another doctor about the chest pains and was told I had a bad heart, indeed that I’d be dead before my next birthday. It wasn’t until I’d sold my business, and was halfway through spending all my money in New York, that I came to my senses. I went to see an American doctor. I’d finally realised that my life, as it was, had become unbearable. I hadn’t taken a holiday, even a trip to the country, for over a decade. My marriage had practically devolved into a business relationship.” Samson stopped smoking his cigar for a moment and coughed into his fist. “God willing, Hendrika and I will be able to put our family back together again,” he said.

  “I’m sure you will. You and your wife have already made the most important movements forward.” Bruno had seated himself opposite his guest. He finished the white liquor and placed the glass near the back leg of his chair.

  Samson remembered the glass he’d placed on the table beside his chair. He sat forward to drink it in one gulp, and then said as he cleared his throat, “I do love my wife. The poor woman put up with so much bad behaviour. I used to be a base creature, crawling home at all hours. I was an insect rather than a man. That death sentence removed the spell I’d been living under. I woke up one morning in New York and my mind was clear. I saw with new vision that I was no longer trapped by that existence. That I need never go back to living under a rock, whether I was in America, or here with Hendrika and my children. It was a metamorphosis. That’s the only word for it. I’m a man breathing free.”

  The travelling salesman had been talking with his eyes closed and he opened them again as though he were reliving his awakening. Bruno stood up and told Samson he would return after he gave Faramond his feedbag. The horse was quiet in his stall. He refused to eat hay from a bale any longer. Years on the streets with Bruno selling roasted nuts had created a habit the horse had recently returned to—eating only from a feedbag. It was minimal feeding, for taste rather than appetite.

  “Please continue with your story, Conrad,” Bruno said when he returned a few minutes later.

  “Naturally, I wanted to thank my physician. Not the American, who told me my heart was healthy, but the doctor that awakened me to the torment and waste my life had become. I went to his practice. I couldn’t thank him though. Do you know why?” Samson’s head tilted forward in a way that suggested he would examine Bruno’s response.

  “Did he slap your face? Did he ask you to leave his practice without further disruption? If he slapped you, there’s no shame in that. People experience such things all the time. Often they benefit from them.”

  Conrad laughed. It was short sound with no mirth. “Nothing that dramatic. No, I really was grateful for the new perspective I gained on life, even if it was just through his ignorance. I didn’t imagine at the time that it was not at all due to ignorance. In any case, that doctor had killed himself. He tied a rope around his neck and jumped. He strangled because he didn’t give himself enough room to drop. It might have taken ten minutes for his arms to grow too weak to hold onto the rope.”

  “That’s terrible. Pathetic and stupid as much as it is tragic,” Bruno said, shaking his head. He called out to Gretchen in the house to bring out some more of the liquor.

  “I might have gone back to my life. I really wanted to understand how it was that I’d been given a new lease on life while the man who gave it to me had hanged himself. I wanted to know why. I went to where my doctor lived, a boarding house, and found that the man’s unclaimed effects were all put into a few boxes in the basement, and that for a little money, they were mine. I was looking for clues and was surprised to find the whole story laid out for me in his journal. Are you interested in how much was revealed?”

  Bruno said, “I’m interested, of course. That poor man. What an unexpected turn of events. Who could have predicted such an action? Suicide, I suppose, must have many reasons and justifications, all of them revealed when it’s too late. We say afterwards, how surprising, and, how unexpected. But tell me. Continue. What did you find in that poor man’s journal?”

  “It revealed a man who dearly loved being a doctor. He was devoted to it in the way only someone very lonely can love a profession. He had found companionship a handful of times and one of those, referred to in the journal as O., turned out to be someone paid to reveal the secrets of his loneliness. It was this act that struck his already tormented heart as particularly difficult to bear. In fact, it was unbearable, eventually.”

  “Such people are usually already very near these decisions.”

  “Aren’t we all? We’re near such destinations, whatever our decisions. Our actions bring us closer to or further away from the borders of life, and eventually we all fall over that imperceptible boundary. And then … we’re simply no more.”

  “And that was all that was in the journal—this dreary tragedy?”

  “No, it was more explicit. In the end it was very clear. He was paid to pass a death sentence on me. He was given a sum of money. He was also coerced. The carrot and stick are always at the centre of these kinds of actions. The stick was very effective in his case because as a homosexual he would not have been able to practise if that information had been made public.”

  “We might as well get to the violence, if that’s what you intend.”

  “If that’s what I intended I would have come equipped for it. In your line of work I’m sure you’re an expert in such encounters. I wanted to talk, and to walk away with some understanding of how and why all this happened.”

  “You want to know who hired me. Or whether this was personal, you being such a success since our schooldays and me so meagre in my achievements. Yes, if things turned out to be so direct, we could lay the world open like one of those mysteries you used to read when we were children. But I haven’t thought about you since those days. And now … well, you are a total irrelevancy in my life. Crossing paths again was bound to happen. That’s all. I wasn’t the author of the action. If it wasn’t me it would have been someone else. Disruption and pain were on the way, and you should be grateful for the way in which I delivered them to you—without even a bruise.”

  “So how did this happen? Who set all this in motion?” Samson moved forward and was perched at the very edge of his chair, his elbows sharply to the sides and his hands on his knees.

  “People do terrible things to other people all the time. They do it in business and war. The rich use the law to destroy the lives of the weak whenever their power or property is threatened. There are other kinds of injustice that are less clear-cut and we’re the professionals who deal with the grievances in ordinary lives, called into action by something as trivial as a broken heart—at other times it’s the despairing murmur of a crushed soul. In this case, a helpless, tormented wife not wanting to disable her sole provider, nevertheless wanting to hurt him for many years of maltreatment. We are really the only recourse for women like your darling Hendrika.”

  Samson didn’t speak. He nodded his head as if he were continuing to listen to Bruno—though his childhood friend had nothing more to say to him. Bruno called out again to his wife. Gretchen brought out the pear-flavoured slivovitz. She’d been sharing the bottle with Hendrika in the kitchen and there wasn’t much left for the men outside when the two laughing women came out. They sang together and danced towards their seated husbands, grasping their hands and lifting their arms so as to get them up, to join them in the dance.

  Bruno woke up feeling dizzy. The world was spinning as he lay in his bed. He was at the bottom of the planet, or at the very pinnacle, experiencing the vertigo of that global movement; the wobble of the axis. He knew it was a trick of his brain chemistry or his imagination. Bruno was nothing but a man, head on a pillow, his relation to the world neither nadir nor zenith and irrelevant to any kind of movement.

  He sat on
the edge of his bed feeling nauseous. There was a vague pain in the back of his throat and he had difficulty swallowing, so he thought he was coming down with something. He decided not to go to work today. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. Jobs were piling up every day. The agency was hiring and expanding. They always seemed to be shorthanded and Bruno would be yelled at for missing a day when he went back in tomorrow.

  He didn’t often remember his dreams and he knew he would soon forget the images of the nightmare he’d had during the night. He was drawing water from a well when he heard a voice calling from below. Bruno realised that it was many years since he’d been to Mr Macht’s cottage, even in the dream, and yet Conrad was still down at bottom of the well. Bruno desperately wanted to pull him out. Now that he was a fully grown man he had the strength to haul up a child. He could hear from the voice that Connie was still a boy. It wasn’t easy and took such a long time—threatening to become an eternity of struggle as his arms grew weaker. Bruno finally saw the shape of the moaning boy, dripping with mud. It wasn’t his best friend that he had pulled out of the abyss. He let go of the rope and the winch spun as it unspooled, and kept spinning when the rope had broken free.

  What a foolish dream, he said to himself as he stood and placed his feet into his slippers. After all those years, it had really been Bruno that Mr Macht had put down the well. Dreams made these foolish switches and turned things upside down. Even so, that dream reality took a while to dissipate. He reminded himself that it was Conrad Samson who’d been lowered down.

  After a breakfast of eggs with bread Gretchen had baked that morning and a glass of grapefruit juice, he went for a long walk. All the way down to the Danube.