When K. went home early in the morning and turned his car into the short, ice-coated driveway, he saw the bird. It was a blackbird. It was standing on one of the posts without moving. Its bird feet were sticking in a thin layer of snow, which made it look as if it didn’t have any feet and was just lying there, in the snow, motionless, like a disoriented tennis ball that has been knocked a long way out of bounds.
The motor running, he now had to get out to open the gate. He switched off the radio and listened to the pleasant thumping of the idling motor; he was tired, he wanted to sleep, preferably right away. He looked at the bird through the windshield and the bird looked at him in the car. He didn’t move.
Until today K. had had no idea how a bird dies; dead birds hadn’t turned up very often. In a year, they counted two or three bodies at most in their garden, and often it was easy to recognize that these creatures had lost their lives fighting. The children always investigated the site of the discovery carefully, the position of the body and anything else: the scattering of feathers and the undersides of the wings, covered with ants wandering this way and that. They found the beak, often minus the head, and the bitten-off bird feet that sometimes stood off to one side looking lost in the grass, as if waiting to go walking again.
“They grab them while they’re sleeping, when they’ve got their heads under their wings. Then they can’t do anything about it.” Bruno elaborated his theory breathlessly. With him everything played out in a legendary battle, a battle that had taken place around midnight—such strange cries, you know—and he claimed to have been wakened by it but then, at some point, to have fallen asleep again. Clara mourned the dead bird and wanted a funeral with a eulogy and prayers.
“Why don’t they stay up above, in the trees?”
“I don’t know, Clara.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to them up there, right?” As he took Clara in his arms and related one of his bird stories, “The Gulls of Fahamore” or “The Bird Feeder from Wannsee”—everything seemed to be coming from a familiar film seen many times, a film in which someone who looked like him was making up comforting things. Without knowing a thing about ornithology, K. explained that most birds hid themselves away when they were dying, as was not uncommon among animals. He himself assumed that birds withdrew to a place far away, very deep in the forest, when their end came, where they had a beautiful, secret spot, a clearing with a Dying Tree, a pine, from which they could let themselves fall undisturbed when the time came. Otherwise wouldn’t we—it scared the children when he started to talk in such a peculiar way—otherwise, K. asked, wouldn’t we be running across the dead ones all the time, little hollow bones, scattered all around, right here in our garden on the edge of the forest, where hundreds of these singers put on their deafening concert every morning and every evening?
The children agreed completely. They collected the remains of the bird in a plastic bucket and buried them under the beech tree, a place that they used as a cemetery. They only carried a few selected feathers and the beak into the shed, where they had a terrarium with dried blindworms, a wild boar’s skull, and other bits and pieces. They planted the feathers in the sand covering the floor of the terrarium, or simply put them standing up in the corners. “The feathers are guarding the bones,” Clara murmured, and with the inside of her narrow hand she stroked the feather forest that had grown up over the years, as if giving a benediction.
No one was coming down the street just now (it would have embarrassed him to be seen sitting in front of his own gateway with the motor running), so he stayed as he was for a while, leaning his forehead briefly on the steering wheel. It was pleasant like that. He was thinking something like: an animal that can no longer look after itself, and he wondered whether the bird could have been sitting there all night, waiting, maybe even since the evening before. K. listened to the motor—the cooling system had switched itself on—and stepped lightly on the gas pedal without really intending to.
The children—they would have noticed him long ago. They would have come to the gate to see why he wasn’t getting out of the car. Bruno would have flung the door open right away to ride into the garage with him. Then they would have returned the short distance through the garden to the street, to close the gate again.
“Things have to keep going somehow, old boy.” He said that under his breath against the windshield, climbing out with a deliberate, effortless movement and going quickly to the gate. Something or other happened as he did this. It was that stony, fixed quality in the bird’s eye, the lack of shyness. K. hesitated and considered whether he shouldn’t turn around instead—after all (the thought flashed pointlessly through his mind), it wasn’t absolutely necessary to drive into the garage in the early morning, not absolutely necessary to come home. He could equally well leave the car parked on the street. Awkwardly, with a frantic, asymmetrical beating of its wings and an unpleasant, strangely drawn-out whistle, the bird pushed itself off and disappeared in the fan-like branches of the pine trees, to the right of the driveway.
“Keep going, going, old boy.” His whispering seemed ridiculous to him now. Fleetingly, K. recalled how he used to turn off the motor when he drove into the driveway, so he could roll into the garage without a sound, and he had raised the garage door so that it wouldn’t scrape the ground. He had come home in the evenings and not in the morning, and he had been quiet. Although K. always brought along everything else that had happened, it seldom crossed his mind—it didn’t occur to him. And this was true as he went back from the garage to the entrance to shut the gate, and the blackbird tumbled (without a whistling sound) from the pine tree down onto the small hedge and hung there unmoving. It must have pushed off heavily, awkwardly, or just slid down; in any case a fine shower of wet snow fell onto the ground, some of it spraying into his collar—K. was startled and raised his hands to his head.
Once he and Bruno had got out of the car in the garage, it was taken for granted that K. would ask him: “Are you coming along to the gate, too?” Bruno would immediately rush forward; K. blinked in the light between the tops of the pines, his steps crunched almost inaudibly on the gravel of the driveway, and all the way to the gate he was free: one breath, a reprieve, a gap of ten, twelve seconds in which nobody and nothing could do anything to him. Then they strolled slowly back to the house side by side, his hand pushing against Bruno’s neck or running through his hair, or some other gesture like that—something else that came from that old, much-viewed film where this was supposed to symbolize complete closeness, and the film really expressed something more: the readiness to give everything if that were necessary. Together, they went down the driveway, K. stroking Bruno’s hair, and what he said as he did so was:
“Well, then?”
Beside him the blackbird jerked itself through the underbrush. Twitching and with a strange gurgling sound it attempted—as if in passing—to eat the red pearls that were growing there, without enough strength for all of them, (for almost none of them, to be precise). Nonetheless it kept trying, but quickly gave up and let the twig glide out of its beak again. It appeared to be maddened by hunger but had no time for that as long as it had to stay at his height. The hedge tore at its already battered feathers, yet it managed to stay at his side, along the hedge all the way to the gate and back, a bird acting like a dog, K. thought, a creature that belongs to you.
The hedge stopped two meters from the house. K. wiped his feet carefully on the grating, stuck the key in the lock, and in the middle of his hesitation, in the middle of the scraping sound of his shoes at the exit, the film ended. The lights went on, he went into the house, and was alone.
Translated from the German by Susan Thorne
Read more work from Lutz Seiler translated by Alexander Booth at Asymptote here.
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Lutz Seiler’s early professional life as a carpenter and mason gave no hint of what was to come later. His interest in literature developed in unusual circumstances when he was introduced to the work of poet Peter Huchel while serving in East Germany’s People’s Army. “I started really reading then,” Seiler recounts, “and writing came along at the same time.” He subsequently studied German literature in Halle and Berlin, and his first poetry collection, berührtgeführt, was published in 1996. Since then Seiler’s work has been recognized with literary prizes including the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (2007), and the prestigious German Book Prize in 2014, awarded for his debut novel KRUSO. (The title is an allusion to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and the story plays out on the Baltic island of Hiddensee). Since 1997, he has lived in Peter Huchel’s former home in Berlin, where he operates the Peter Huchel Literary Museum.
Susan Thorne has translated German-language fiction, poetry, travel literature and popular philosophy into English; including works of Uwe Johnson, Peter Härtling, Jurek Becker, and Wolfgang Koeppen, among others. Her work has been published by Oxygen Press and in Two Lines Online, ORIGINS, Verfreundungseffekt, and No Man’s Land. Formerly an online instructor of German to English Literary Translation at New York University, she is also a consultant in Old German Script and is the incoming Editor of No Man’s Land, an online journal of new German literature.
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