"Quickly! What features characterize the Steinman boy's scratchings in that notebook of his?"
"Well, he has the strange trait, of course, of reversing his words. Mirror writing. Apparently, according to the doctors, it's related in some way to his inability to speak. Some sort of trauma, no doubt. And then I have noticed that he is an execrable speller."
"Yes! And when, in what I now perceive to have been a pathetic plea for assistance, he scrawled the words leg ov red' on a bit of paper, he was neatly exhibiting both traits."
"Leg ov red," Mr. Panicker tried, projecting and reversing the letters against an interior screen. "Der. . Vog. . el." Ah. "Der Vogel. He was asking after the bird. Of course."
"Yes. And now, tell me what he was saying on the other side of the scrap."
"Scrap?"
The old man thrust a bit of writing paper into his hands.
"This scrap. On which was written, by an adult man,
young, with a Continental hand, the address of the very establishment before which we now sit. Dropped, or so I mistakenly concluded, by the proprietor himself."
"Blak," Mr. Panicker read. And then, reverse-projecting it: "Good God."
10
He had seen madmen: the man who smelled of boiled bird-flesh was going mad. He knew the smell of bird-flesh, for they ate it. They ate anything. The knowledge that the men of his home forests would burn and eat with relish the flesh of his own kind was a stark feature of his ancestral lore. In the first days of his captivity the contemplation of their bloody diet and the likelihood that he was being kept by them against the satiation of some future hunger so troubled and revolted him that he had fallen silent and chewed a bald place in the feathers of his breast. By now he was long accustomed to the horror of their appetities, and he had lost the fear of being eaten; insofar as he had observed them, these men, pale creatures, though they devoured birds in cruel abundance and variety, arbitrarily exempted his kind from slaughter. The bird they ate most often was the kurcze Hahne poulet chicken kip and it was this odor, of a chicken slaughtered and boiled in water with carrots and onions, that, for some reason, the man who was going mad exuded, even though he never appeared to eat anything more than toast and tinned sardines.
In the Dutchman's house, by the harbor, on the island of his hatching, when he still feared the fires and teeth of these terrible apes with their strange, beguiling songs, he had gone, he supposed, slightly mad himself. As he watched the boiled-chicken man, Kalb, stalk back and forth across the room, hour after hour, the pelt of his head disordered, the pelt of his face grown thick, singing softly to himself, the parrot would creep, in unwilling sympathy, from one end to the other of his perch, and feel a certain comfort in so doing, and recall how, in those first fearful months with the Dutchman, he had passed hours making the same short journey, back and forth, silently chewing on his own plumage until he bled.
He had seen madmen. The Dutchman had gone mad, in fact; had killed with the knotted-up bones of his hands the girl who shared his bed, then drunk his own death in a glass of whisky spoilt by the worst-smelling substance that Bruno had yet encountered in his long life among men and their remarkable vocabulary of stenches. Whisky had a stench of its own, but it was one that Bruno during the later time of his tenure with le Colonel had learned to appreciate. (It had been ages now since anyone had offered whisky to Bruno. The boy and his family never drank it at all, and though he had often detected its acrid flavor on the breath and clothing of Poor Reggie, he had never actually seen Poor Reggie with a glass or bottle of the stuff in his hand.) Le Colonel had his bouts of madness, too, silent, lasting glooms into which he sank so far that his songlessness Bruno experienced as a kind of sorrow, though it was nothing like the sorrow that he felt now, having lost his boy, Linus, who sang in secret, to Bruno alone.
It was one of Linus's old songs, the train song, that was driving Kalb mad, in a way Bruno did not entirely understand but that he appreciated and, it must be admitted, even encouraged. Kalb would come to stand before Bruno on his perch, with a sheet of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other, and beg him to sing the train song, the song of the long rolling cars. The room was filled with sheets of paper that the man had covered with claw marks, marks that Bruno understood to represent, in a manner whose principles he grasped but had never learned to master, the elements, simple and infectious, of the train song. Sometimes when the man left the room they shared, he would return with a small blue bundle of folded paper, which he tore open as if it were food and voided hungrily of its contents. Invariably and to Bruno's bemused annoyance these contents turned out to be yet another sheet of little marks. And then the pleas and threats would begin again.
The man was standing there now, shoeless, shirtless, with just such a torn blue sheet of claw marks in his hand, muttering. He had come in not long before, breathing heavily from his climb up the steps of the high room, and exuding powerfully his characteristic smell of murdered and boiled bird.
"The routing prefix," he kept saying to himself, bitterly, in the language of the boy and his family. This man could also speak in the language of Poor Reggie and his family, and once there had been a visitor-their single visitor-with whom the madman had easily conversed in the language of Wierzbicka, whose memory Bruno would always reverence, because it was Wierzbicka the sad-voiced little tailor who had sold Bruno to the boy's family, in a transfer that Bruno had experienced, without quite knowing it at the time but thereafter retrospectively and certainly since losing Linus, as the sense and fulfillment of his long life's pointless wanderings.
"There is no fucking prefix," Kalb said. He lowered the sheet of blue paper and fixed his madman's gaze on Bruno. Bruno set his head to an angle that, among his own kind, would have been understood as an eloquent expression of sardonic intransigence, and waited.
"How about some letters, for a change?" the man said. "Don't you know any letters?"
Letters was in fact a concept that he grasped, or at any rate one that he recognized; it was the name of the bright bundles of paper that men ripped open so ravenously and watched so hopelessly with their darting white eyes.
"Alphabet?" Kalb tried. "A-B-C?"
Bruno held his head steady, but his pulse quickened at the sound. He was fond of alphabets; they were intensely pleasurable to sing. He remembered Linus singing his alphabet, in the tiny errant voice of his first vocalizations. The memory was poignant, and the urge to repeat his ABC bubbled and rose in Bruno until it nearly overwhelmed him, until his claws ached for the give of the boy's slim shoulder. But he remained silent. The man blinked, breathing steadily, angrily, through his soft pale beak.
"Come on," he said. He bared his teeth. "Please. Please."
The alphabet song swelled and billowed, distending Bruno's breast. As was true of all his kind there was a raw place somewhere, inside him, that singing pressed against in a way that felt very good. If he sang the alphabet song for the man, the rawness would diminish. If he sang the train song, which had lingered far longer and more vividly in his mind than any of the thousand other songs he could sing, for reasons unclear even to him but having to do with sadness, with the sadness of his captivity, of his wanderings, of his finding the boy, of the rolling trains, of the boy's mama and papa and the mad silence that had come over the boy when he was banished from them, then the rawness would be soothed. It was bliss to sing the train song. But the alphabet song would do.
He could just sing a little of it; just the beginning. Surely that could be of no possible value to the man. He shined his staring left eye at Kalb, fighting him as he had been fighting him for weeks.