“Are you from here?” I ask him bluntly, sipping on my soda. The youngster whitens and glances nervously over his shoulder, as if he were expecting someone.
“I see that you two have already introduced yourselves,” says a man taking a seat at the table beside the youngster.
He slips a hand around the boy’s shoulder, as if to tell him he’s got nothing to fear, and smiles at me. It’s the man from the bridge.
“Hi, and thanks for your help earlier.”
“Same to you.”
“We came to listen to the singing, but he’ll have to wait a few years before we can watch the act that follows the choir,” he says.
After chatting with them for a while, I tell him I have to go and check on Tumi. As I get up, he asks if I could do him a favour. He has to take the boy home before the show begins and he wants to know if I can watch the sick falcon for him while he’s away, it’s in a box.
“He’s already been fed, so you won’t have any worries. It’ll just be for a few hours or until tomorrow morning at the latest. There’s one place I have to stop off at on the way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be back at the hotel tonight.”
Far be it from my mind to weigh the prospect of the company of a feathered predator against that of a naked man, I can clearly see that I will be given no choice about which of the two I would like to sleep or wake up with.
He follows me to room ten, walking behind me up the stairs with the box in his arms, and places it on the bedside table. The bird gives us a hostile glare through the two little holes in the box. The kitten immediately arches its back and hisses at the feathered guest, fluffing its hair up in all directions. Before we know it, he’s leapt out into the corridor and vanished around the corner on two paws, as if he had been swallowed up by the earth. The man from the bridge promises to help me find the kitten when he gets back, and tells me he is extremely grateful for the favour.
I notice how he rapidly glances around the room as he’s leaving, and picks up the duvet, which the boy has kicked off onto the floor, and spreads it back over him again, showing the same care to all creatures great and small, just like those ptarmigan chicks.
“I’m a vet,” he says. “I have to pop over to a farm to perform a caesarean on a calving cow.”
I pull out a book, the posthumous publication of an early work by a French author, and read a story about a father and son who perished as the father was trying to save his ten-year-old son from drowning. The boy was then buried in his father’s arms in the churchyard on the island, which they had planned to visit before returning on the ferry that evening. I’m having problems concentrating on my reading under the menacing stare of our overnight guest; not even the death of the hero manages to hold my attention. I decide not to sleep, but to wait for the return of the falcon’s owner. The choir resounds from the floor below. They are being applauded now and will no doubt give an encore. I seem to have dozed off for a moment, because when I come to, I remember fragments of a dream: I’m lying on the grass under an apple tree and, as I’m looking up at these succulent red apples, I hear myself saying: “Opportunities will soon fall on you.”
THIRTY-NINE
By the time I return to the hall, the lights have been dimmed and a rotating multi-coloured mirror ball has been lowered into the middle of the dance floor. An exotic bird is about to launch herself around the central pillar. She has travelled from far across the desert, considerably further than the choir even, judging by the colour of her caramel toes and violet nail polish. Her eyelids droop heavily as she holds one leg suspended in mid-air, displaying a foot in a laced shoe with a thick sole and high heel. A heavy burden seems to weigh on her as she slowly allows herself to sink to the floor, until her black fringe touches the newly laid oak parquet. Despite the heavily dimmed lights, the scars are clearly visible under her breasts. The lights revolve, blinking green, red and violet. Huddled together up against the stage, the men form a protective wall around the exotic bird who has come from afar. Several of them are talking into their mobile phones in various languages, probably to the wives they haven’t seen for such a long time. But the star of the male choir’s secret surprise number is clearly having problems hoisting herself off the floor again, and eventually solves the problem by squatting and parting her knees to the audience.
After this, many guests join in the karaoke. The hotel manager and a group of foreigners burst into a rendition of O sole mio, and are followed by three men singing the song about the man who sailed home again across the sea, I Am Sailing. The last singer is a man with a long torso and greenish-blue tie whose bulging dry lips almost kiss the microphone as he stretches his long neck, while the rest of his body remains on the stage. He moistens his lips and tilts the microphone stand forward, as if it were a woman in a tango. The tune hiccups around the hall until the voice is suddenly isolated on stage with no accompaniment and the man eventually realizes that the playback has broken down. He stands by the mike, silently mouthing the words with his lips, as some men rush across the hall. Then the room erupts into whistles and applause, and the singer awkwardly adjusts his tie.
The heat and humidity are rising, the men have slipped their jackets onto the backs of their chairs, people are starting to touch, collide, rub against each other and step on each other’s toes — the pairing off for the night has begun.
The owner of the falcon suddenly reappears again and sits down beside me in the corner.
“Hi again,” he says, “did I miss much?”
“Loads, how did the caesarean go?”
“Well, it was a white calf with red spots, just like its mother.”
“Was that your son?”
“No, he’s the son of some friends; he was helping me out today so I invited him here for a meal at the Pizzeria Space.”
He has booked a night for himself and the bird in room thirteen, which is just opposite ours in the corridor. When we get upstairs, the door is open and the boy has vanished from his bed. The box is still on the table. We run up and down the full length of the corridor, up and down the stairs, and rush to warn the staff at the reception desk that a child has disappeared from his bed. I’m so irresponsible and careless. There’s no one at the reception desk. I think I hear a gunshot outside the hotel. A drunken guest reports seeing a dwarf in elephant pyjamas somewhere backstage. And that’s where we find him, wide awake, holding the kitten in his arms, beside the striptease artist, who has almost completely changed back into her civilian clothing again.
The man from the bridge carries the boy upstairs, as I hold the kitten. The bird needs to be moved into the other room, but as soon as we approach room ten we notice something odd: the door is ajar, the window wide open and the fluttering curtains are more perforated than I remember. The box is still on the table but there’s no sign of life inside. The bird is dead inside the cage — heart attack, says the expert, his plumage is still intact at any rate. We all move into room thirteen and leave the box in number ten until morning.
The girl at the reception desk can offer no explanation for how the lead pellets got through the open window. The male choir is sitting at the breakfast table with sombre faces.
“Well there might have been some shooting last night,” she finally concedes with some reluctance, “the guests from the dam might have been trying to shoot some snow buntings to throw on the grill, the way they do back in their home countries.”
FORTY