The Butcherbird Stories Read online

  The river today had a few ducks sullenly dragging themselves through the water reeds, and there were some angry waterfowl that Bruno couldn’t identify, with what looked like red wax melted onto their faces around their ugly beaks, moving towards him threateningly whenever he came close to the water’s edge. The day was overcast and there was hardly another person anywhere along the banks of the Danube. The water was dark and he wondered whether the body of the swimmer was still down there, snagged on submerged wreckage.

  Bruno walked away from the great river and wandered without a destination in mind. He found himself passing his daughter’s schoolhouse. It was nearing lunchtime and he knew the children would soon be released for half an hour to play in the schoolyard. Bruno felt an intense wave of dizziness pass over him. He took a seat on a park bench below an elm tree.

  Bruno had enjoyed spending time in the school library when he was his daughter’s age and could always be found there looking at one kind of book or another. A fascination for the stars lasted for two or three years. There was a memory of gazing at the vast cosmos above, at Uncle Winfried’s orchards, way up on a hill—of staring into the vast field above their heads and being told by Winfried that the clouds within it were stars and that it all went on and on forever; of trying to imagine the impossible idea of clouds of suns and an infinity of lights.

  He waited and considered the strange experience he’d had this morning of being on either the bottom or the top of a spinning sphere. Bruno hadn’t thought much about the planets or the stars since those schooldays. It had been as long as a decade since he’d last looked into the night sky. He recalled saying he wanted to be an astronomer when a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. The teacher had laughed. It seemed more absurd to Bruno than it might have to that almost forgotten educator.

  The children were playing in their yard when Bruno blinked and came out of his reverie. He wasn’t feeling as light-headed now but he decided he wouldn’t intrude on the children. The teachers might object, even if all he wanted to do was find Nina and talk to her, give her a coin for something nice to eat. He noticed his daughter in the playground and he saw her limping along—the poor thing had twisted an ankle playing with Klemens at home last night. His son wasn’t at school because Gretchen had already found him a job at a local butchery.

  Nina was dressed in a green dress that needed replacing and she had her favourite red shoes on. Nina and her friends were walking around the schoolyard together. After another moment it became clear that her friends, Sabrina, Agnes and Magda, were waiting for his daughter to catch up just so they could quickly walk away once more. Nina set off after them again, with her hurt ankle. They continued walking, talking among themselves, apparently oblivious of the game they were playing, stopping to notice something on the ground, and then skipping away again as soon as Nina had limped up to where they had been.

  This action continued throughout the play period and when a teacher came outside and rang a bell, all the children made their way into the schoolhouse. Some children dawdled, finishing a game of marbles, or kicking higher and higher on a swing before leaping into the sand below, so Nina wasn’t the last to make it through the door, but her happy friends, Sabrina, Agnes and Magda, had long since disappeared within.

  Bruno didn’t know what his daughter was thinking or feeling. All he could tell from his park bench across the road was that the little girl with red shoes and a green dress had doggedly limped around for half an hour on a twisted ankle. He stood up and began the long walk home. When a tram came trundling along he got on board and closed his eyes for most of the trip.

  There was a package on his doorstep, delivered while he was out. He took it inside and set it on top of the kitchen table and struck up a flame on his stove and placed the kettle on top to boil. He called out to see if there was anyone else at home who might want tea. No-one replied. Perhaps he was home alone. The kettle whistled. When he’d made his cup of tea he returned to the kitchen table.

  The package was addressed to Bruno Kramzer. He opened it and found a wrapped box. There was no sender information on the package and no card had come with the gift. His birthday was not for a week. He ripped open the wrapping and thought it would be a box of pencils. The leather box was roughly of the right size and shape. A silly gift from a distant uncle or aunty—one of those useless things that went straight into the attic.

  Bruno took another sip of his tea and opened the leather box. Inside, within a red felt groove, was a hunting knife with a burlwood handle. The vertigo he’d been feeling all day vanished and his mind was clearer than it had been in months. Bruno didn’t breathe as he lifted the blade and found it was just as sharp as he’d left it thirty years ago.

  Rainer walked to the carriage with his new eye patch and lit a cigarette when he got into the cabin. The horses jerked into motion and his head bounced a little; otherwise he seemed fine. A few months had gone by since their last job together. Rainer had been given a desk job but insisted he was only useful in the field. Bruno’s hands had long since healed from the same incident. They had a tendency to tremble, even when he wasn’t feeling agitated. He had intended to wear gloves today to disguise this embarrassing fact, so instead, he gripped the leather manila envelope that lay in his lap.

  “Who’s this?” Rainer asked of the third man in the cabin with him and Bruno.

  “This is Otto,” said Bruno.

  Rainer blew smoke at the new man. “Look at those small hands. They gonna be any use in a scrap?”

  “I’ll kick the balls out of your sack if that’s what you’re asking, Cyclops,” Otto said without moving. He was wearing steel-toe boots, and his small fists looked not only adequate, they were ready to pummel Rainer where he sat.

  “Well, we’ll see.” Rainer cranked open a window and blew smoke out into the frigid morning air. “Small hands are not an advantage in this line of work,” he said.

  “Actually … ” Bruno said, regretting the choice of word. There was something weak about it. He could sense it in the way his two colleagues looked at him. “It’s not the kind of work we’ll be doing for a while,” Bruno told the two men. “I’ve been informed that we’ll be getting into a different kind of action for now. They say they’re looking for new ways to do the job. More effective methods.” He nodded at the two men and then pulled a file from the folder and began to consult it.

  That was the limit of the information he’d been given and the file simply gave him a description of the latest target: a bank clerk called Josef K, living in a boarding house. It had been suggested the current job would involve various teams, functioning in different aspects of a larger action. For now, all Bruno knew was that they were to proceed to an address and place the bank clerk under arrest. When Bruno asked his superiors how they were to accomplish this without the necessary badges, he was told the full details of the action were not his concern. Bruno was informed that there was a new direction and he would understand soon enough.

  Otto was sitting opposite Bruno and Rainer. He yawned very loudly, revealing an enormous mouth and his every tooth. He stretched his arms above his head. They folded below the canvas ceiling of the carriage like wriggling tentacles. Across his neck was a long, thin scar, running from ear to ear. It was apparent that someone had run a knife along that track but had failed to push it deep enough. A hand once had the intention to kill yet lacked the last necessary thrust of conviction.

  Otto cleared his throat when he was done yawning, plucked the half-smoked cigarette out of Rainer’s hand and threw it out the window.

  Otto said, “Everyone’s talking about more effective methods and being modern. About that fellow in Vienna, Siegfried Freud, and what can be done with that psychology. As far as I understand it, we’ll all be pioneers in using these revolutionary ideas.”

  Rainer closed the window and began digging in his pocket for something. Bruno would not have been surprised if Rainer was fishing for the small blade he could use between hi
s knuckles when he made a fist. Instead, Rainer brought out the kind of box that might hold a diamond ring for a fiancée. He removed his patch and fitted a glass eye into the vacant socket.

  “Takes some getting used to,” Rainer said.

  “It does indeed,’ said Otto with a grimace.

  Rainer coughed and the glass eye popped out. He caught it after a bit of a juggle and put the eye back in, apologising with a grin on his face. He began to take long breaths as if he were about to sneeze, placing one hand on the door handle and the other on Bruno’s shoulder, to steady himself, and in rising pitch said, “Uh, uh, uh, uh,” and out popped the glass eye again. Rainer and Otto laughed until tears came to their eyes.

  “I’m going to enjoy working with you,” said Otto when he caught his breath. He leaned forward and slapped Rainer’s knee, saying, “Well, in fact, we’ve already worked together. I was on the other end of that Conrad Samson action. I got the leverage on the doctor.”

  Bruno blinked. He didn’t want to tell Otto that Conrad had been hired by the agency and would soon be processed. It was possible Connie might even have a part to play in the present action. Instead, Bruno gazed at Otto without speaking.

  “And how did you manage that?” Bruno asked. “Rainer and I couldn’t get that doctor to budge. You must have gotten into the doctor’s head … somehow. What was your method?”

  Otto looked at Bruno without speaking. The three men swayed to the movement of the carriage. Otherwise, they were very still, and Rainer began looking at Bruno as well. It felt as if they were holding their breath but Bruno knew he was breathing too loudly and rapidly. His hands were shaking despite his grip on the leather folder and he wondered whether it was noticeable.

  “Every man wants to breathe, right?” Otto said. He tilted his head as he continued to look at Bruno. “Well, there’s an ocean of fear—no doubt about it, a veritable sea of anxiety, and all of our targets walk across a frozen surface. I come along with my sharpened axe and I place it between their toes.” Otto suddenly stamped one of his steel-toe boots between Bruno’s feet. Otto laughed with his eyes wide open and Rainer followed along, chuckling. “And when they start drowning, it’s so easy. I stand at the hole in the ice and push them back in. The longer they’re below the ice, the easier it is to get what I need.” He winked at his one-eyed comrade and they both smiled.

  Bruno felt his eyes getting hot and an excruciating pressure building within his lungs. He realised to his horror that he was about to blubber like a child. He hadn’t wept since he was Nina’s age yet that kind of snot-nosed crying was imminent. There was, of course, that moment when Klemens had come and hugged his legs, but Bruno thought there was a difference between shedding a few tears and weeping.

  With these two men beside him he couldn’t afford even wet eyes. He stamped his feet and said it was too stuffy in the cabin. He ordered Rainer to open the damned window. He barked at Otto to move his fucking feet. Bruno was on the verge of striking either of his partners. The heaving in his chest was about to turn into an outpouring of grief.

  He should have wept yesterday, Bruno thought as he snatched the cigarettes and matches out of Rainer’s pocket and lit up, blowing smoke at Otto and grinning at him ghoulishly. Yesterday would have been much better than today, for tears or weeping. He had taken Faramond to an abattoir because it made sense to make some money. Why pay a veterinarian to shoot the nag? There was also a cost for the horse to be buried in a mass animal grave— all for the sake of foolish sentimentality.

  Better to have them cut the horse up into meat and bones for dogs. What was wrong with that? Why did it make him want to weep now? When he was at the abattoir he had felt nothing. He looked at the horse and knew that Faramond would never be able to even pull a nut cart along again. He was trembling on his legs simply standing. When Bruno brought the brush down to groom the old horse, Faramond pulled away as if it hurt, and so the solution was clear.

  Bruno wound down his window and blew smoke out into the crisp morning air. He leaned his face out of the carriage and the rush of cold helped him quell the unshed heat of his tears. His right hand had found the burlwood handle in his belt without much thought until he felt the anxiety of his partners in the mute silence of the carriage. Their fear gave him strength.

  Bruno looked out at the passing neighbourhood and said, “I think we’re almost there.”

  When the carriage stopped, Rainer jumped out, as sprightly as he was before his injury. Otto followed, adjusting his rogue’s belt and making sure he had everything he would need.

  “Seems the perfect weather for your roasted nuts,” Rainer said to Bruno as he stepped down onto the footpath. And then to Otto, “Bruno used to have a horse and cart. He sold hot cashews and all manner of goodies, didn’t you, Bruno?”

  A mother with an infant in a perambulator was passing and a snowflake drifted down and fell into the baby’s open mouth.

  Bruno lifted his collar for warmth and breathed out a cloud of steam. He leaned back and scanned the tall building. Only the top of it reached the morning sunlight. For now the narrow streets were shadowed with lingering darkness. Josef K was on the third floor, most probably still in bed. Bruno wasn’t interested in reminiscing about the cart and he knew that Rainer’s intent was to diminish and embarrass him—as though Bruno had never been anything more than a roaming vendor of nuts.

  “I might have done you a favour a while ago, even if neither of us knew it at the time,” Otto said as he gave Bruno’s shoulder a friendly slap. “By taking out some of your competition,” Otto added as he stamped his boots on the footpath to get some circulation into his cold toes. “There was a store over by the museum and they sold a hell of a lot of nuts in that place. I put a match to it about five years ago. Some small change the office gave me after I got this nick on my throat.”

  Rainer held the door open and Otto walked into the building. Rainer waited for Bruno and after a motionless moment Rainer bowed deeply with an extravagant flourish of his arm and hand—playing the fawning doorman ushering in visiting royalty. His glass eyeball came loose in the movement and bounced out at Bruno’s feet.

  The Rothko

  The house comes with furniture. When we move our own stuff in, we throw out the former owner’s belongings— except for the paintings. The paintings go into the garage and then return after a few weeks. Most of them are placed where they hung in the house previously. The walls haven’t been painted in so long the paintings fit into faintly visible outlines like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only one of the paintings stays in the garage because it isn’t clear to any of us where it is meant to go.

  The house was a deceased estate so all these paintings seem an invitation for ghosts. After three years we’ve repainted and refurbished, naturally. Within a few months we forgot what we had on the walls at our last house. So the paintings stay where they have always been. And our family is as it was before. Even so we rarely look at the paintings. When we do, we’re glad we have them but it’s our home, after all, not a gallery or a museum.

  One day there’s a knock at the door and we’re surprised to see it is Frank Sinatra. There’s none of the stage presence one would expect. He’s not particularly big. His blue eyes aren’t striking. Lots of people have blue eyes. And his voice is a regular Jersey voice—though, of course, he’s speaking, not singing. Frank Sinatra explains that one of the paintings on our walls belongs to him and it is worth millions. It’s an incredible stroke of luck until I remember that Frank Sinatra is not only a famous singer, he is also a ruthless man with mob connections. When Frank Sinatra says something belongs to him it’s not easy to argue. He shakes his head and doesn’t speak when we show him the contract for the property and its contents. He won’t enter our house. He continues to stand in the doorway looking at me and my family with an implacable determination to get what is his. It’s impossible to close the door on Frank Sinatra.

  When he leaves, the evening falls and we prepare dinner. We eat in silence, was
h the dishes quickly, pass by the painting Sinatra says is his without glancing at it. After the children’s teeth are brushed and we have read them a story and they are in bed, my wife and I sit in the lounge and look at the painting. We intended to throw all the paintings away and changed our minds. They came back from the garage and we like them. We were never art lovers in the past. Even so, all the paintings have become essential aspects of our home—our windows into landscapes of the soul. They offer us perspectives we have never seen before yet they have not changed us for the better. After a few years of living with them we still don’t know what a soul is or what the paintings mean to us.

  We talk about selling the painting and what that might entail. We don’t have connections in the art world. We don’t know who the artist is or what Sinatra’s painting is called. There isn’t an authorial scribble in the corner of the canvas which we might endeavour to decipher. And there are no historical moments, mythological motifs or bowls of fruit. We’ve never before attempted to describe any of the paintings. Rough images with no hard lines, slowly dissolving shapes and colours; immense smudges of mood, warmth and homecoming, finally revealing finer perceptions and visions, a vast interior of spirit. Wordless, we shake our heads—that these hallucinations might fetch such fantastical numbers from the bank accounts of the wealthy.

  After a long while we go to bed. I listen to my wife’s breath change to a rhythm of sleep and I blink in the lightless bedroom and know there’s no way for me to make sure she’s safe or to keep my daughters from harm. I can’t follow my children to kindergarten and primary school and my wife to her job, and I am myself easily destroyed.

  I ease out of bed and get dressed in the dark. I don’t need to switch on a light to move through the house. Enough illumination is coming through from the moon outside. I take the painting down from the wall and I walk out onto the street. I make my way to the hotel that Frank Sinatra is staying in while he’s in Melbourne. The elevator takes me up to his floor. I knock on the door. I wait and I knock again.