Goodbye, Bird

one-2

Bird has jumped on the bed and is lying at my feet meowing restlessly. He takes a burning cigarette out of his mouth and tries to put it in the cat’s mouth. It turns its head. It doesn’t want it. Then he puts his hand under the bed again. There should be another bottle. Suddenly his fingers rub against a familiar and disgusting bald spot. It’s impossible. My God. It’s the commander again. He shakes his body and tries to call for help, and through the half-open door of his room he sees the contortions of his own terrified face, his mute mouth opening and closing in weightlessness, and his mouth’s resilient movements in a vacuum. Drops of cognac slowly flow down the edges of his lips. He tries to strain his consciousness, tries to understand whether anyone in the house can hear that terrifying screech leaving his throat or whether it’s him, only him who can hear his own screech. The commander breathes steadily. The air blowing out of his nostrils burns. I’ve been discharged for a while now, you hear? Leave me alone, commander! What do you want, you son of a b***h? Every night you come and hide under my bed and scatter my brain with the chain in your hand. But your chain doesn’t hurt me anymore. Flog the corpse as much as you want. I neither have flesh nor blood. Are you that stupid, you still don’t get it, you deformed miscarriage? Don’t you understand that your beatings now are completely meaningless? You’re nothing outside of the military base, you one-legged scarecrow planted in a field! Impotent. Back then, in your room, you hit me so much that the skin on my face, my nose, my mouth, my chin shattered, then you made me sweep up every piece of my face one by one, and splitting your sides with laughter, you said, take it to the open window and let the wind carry it away. You bequeathed me an eternal pastime after my discharge, commander! Now I stand by the window all day looking out for hours and I make up facial features in the rising wind that turn into sharp shards, glide away, and get lost in a cloud of dust. But, do you remember, commander, how you scratched up my face with your teeth? You turned everything on its head. The boys were saying that you supposedly sharpened your row of gold teeth with an electric sharpener every morning. They were probably joking or maybe they were telling the truth. I didn’t feel any pain, commander, it’s just that the more you hit my head, the deeper my inner emptiness and sadness grew. Every hit on my head taught me how to think, taught me how to remember again and go, leaving my body behind under your shoes. He tightly closes his mouth with both hands. He clenches his teeth and presses his fingers together so that through no crack, through no narrow passage, your spit, your disgusting spit, will bound into my mouth. During the morning formation, in the motionless silence, I couldn’t hold in my friend’s wonderful mime jokes and I chuckled, and I didn’t know that for laughing I would have to pay with my mouth for two years, I didn’t know that my laugh would be my mouth’s last goodbye. When you dragged me into your room, closed the door, and started to break my body with dull and rhythmic strikes, at that moment the strikes seemed so real to me, so angry and blunt that I experienced them as an important acquisition to what had been missing from my body all these years–as an honest flattery. But you moved to my mouth. My mouth was what you needed. You laughed with this trap, didn’t you, birth of a w***e? This is the trap you couldn’t shut, wasn’t it, soldier? Now watch me shut it! I have to fight for you, lay down my life, hold up a homeland for a motherfucker like you, so that you can’t control your trap? Foaming stream with popping white bubbles. Slowly, very slowly, from your blood-gushing cheeks, which will later glitter in a sad wooden box in the middle of your living room like a little isle veiled with makeup. You couldn’t hold your laugh during the morning formation. Your friend Zizu’s face contorted and changed with such improbable flexibility into different moods and conditions that not laughing would simply equal to not breathing. The commander holds your throat with one hand and with the fingers of the other hand he squeezes your jaw, trying to open your mouth. The pressure of his fingers makes the corners of your lips crack open. Your mouth opens up. You move your head from side to side, shaking uncontrollably. You are struck against the floor with your temple and the top of your forehead. The commander gathers up a good swill of saliva and spits straight into your mouth. Suddenly you start to laugh, laugh, laugh hysterically with cackles and snorts. Your chest thunders and your legs point straight up into the air. Somehow confused by the surprise, the commander grabs you by the hair and starts to beat your head against the floor. Your laugh becomes even more intense. The dull and inescapable roar thudding against the walls of the room is reborn. The commander starts to erratically sputter in your face. Then he closes your mouth with the palm of his hand. Shut up, asshole, shut up! Are you trying to call the cops on me? You want me to kill you, is that what you want? His palm has embalmed your mouth. Now your laugh fills up inside. It finds its own way. It goes to a place you’ve never been. It laughs for silence, modestly rejoicing at itself. Before going to the army, your mother would tell you what a beautiful soldier you’d make. Now she won’t even look at my face. We speak with our shoulders. I stand in front of the mirror for hours and comb my hair with a little comb, my hair is not visible, or, more precisely, I don’t see myself, I positively realize that I don’t see. I don’t exist and I realize the realization that I don’t exist, it seems as if I have existed and I do exist, but you can’t see that I have existed and I do exist, it seems as if it’s the comb that’s grooming my hair, but without a comb and without hair. I point my finger at the mirror where a young man stands, but without a finger and without a young man–I’m simply a blind spot. Shame on you, you little w***e. You’ve dragged your heavy stars, you’ve come after a dead man. Why did you come? What do you want? Do you have amnesia? And now you come after your discharged soldiers? Did you open a corpse factory? I’m looking for a job, if there’s a vacancy, I’d love to work there. But why do you slither every day and lie under my bed? Doesn’t your wife like you either? I know, you’re one of those tough old boys used to fields and soil, facing your face up to space. Don’t you have a home and a wife, don’t you have soldiers to violate anymore? What do you want from me? I already know where you live and I quit my job, because I’ve already saved up all my money for a gun, beeeeeeeeee caaaaaaaaareful veeeeeeeeeery caaaaaaaaareful, commander, IIIIIIIIIIII will shooooooooooooooot straight into your forehead, I’m not afraaaaaaaaaaaaaaid. I keep a knife under my pillow now. I’m serious. I’ll turn on the light and cut your throat or call my mother. You don’t know my mother very well. If she comes, she’ll kick the life out of you, and don’t you ever touch Bird again. You hear? Bird is not one of the boys you knew. It doesn’t have a mouth. Instead of coming and making coffee even just once and talking about our service, the military tactics of the enemy, the fate of the army, your glorious past, I think you’ve accomplished quite a few heroic feats, no, or did you make those up? Well, whatever, even if you were making things up, that’s okay, we all make things up. The measure of things made-up is never excessive. His sheets are drenched and clinging to his body. The big drops of sweat quiver on the apples of his cheeks. He picks up the cat and tightly presses it against his chest. Bird is not a soldier, you w***e. You won’t slaughter it anymore, you won’t catch it under the wall of the mess hall and you won’t break its neck, and you won’t hurl its head at our feet. It’s all the same, we won’t tell you whose cat it is. Asshole, “whose is it?” never relates to a cat. It was the unit’s cat whose head you tore off. The fur by its neck was torn. Its coagulated blood had stuck to its fur like a little tick. It wasn’t breathing. You shouldn’t kill a cat, commander. It’s a sin. I know, I read it somewhere. The ancient Egyptians cursed those who raised their hand against a cat, they subjected them to terrible tortures. Cats are friends to humans. They cure many diseases. They cure everybody, even babies born sick. The babies are born sick–they’re born, they feel pain and then they die. But suddenly one day between life and death they suddenly see a cat in the window and they extend their plump little hands towards it. Their little cheeks tremble in joy and their irises sparkle as sparks of being alive. You, too, have extended your finger towards a cat and your finger was also plump, but at that time they had lied to you. At the military base, we did not eat cat meat. We preferred dog. Don’t laugh, the Egyptians won’t forgive you. I’ve asked those old boys. Whoever kills cats falls into their world. The cats enter your body and then they meow, they constantly meow. They don’t kill you, they don’t bite your lungs, your kidneys, your windpipe, because you fall into their world gutted, so that it’s spacious for them inside. They only meow and meow and meow. The cats have made you immortal so that you hear their meows forever, so that you’re the only one who hears their echoes. They say that cats meow to forget their own nightmares. There’s no escape from consciousness. You try to die from the terror. No, it’s not working. You have no strength. You cat-filled bag, meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooow meeeeeeee meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooooooooow what are you staring at, commander? Are you trying to remember my name? Anonymous cadet. Remember? To leave the room I now have to empty the whole bottle of cognac and find courage again, open the door and scurry out. He empties the bottle to the last drop. He holds Bird and keeping his balance somehow he opens the heavy door. Now you have to start walking, little soldier. Don’t be afraid. Walking will distance you. Lift your foot. Put it on the floor or on the window sill. But make sure to look at the traffic on the street first. Make sure there aren’t any children on the street. They’ll get very scared. They don’t have to see. Lovely children with gentle smiles and soft hands. It’ll probably rain outside. Fine, if you want, let it rain. And to get to the marketplace you have to keep walking down the street. You’re right, to get somewhere you always have to walk. So here we go, don’t forget to move your feet first. The bus full of conscripts is waiting for you. Your family waves goodbye. You see that moment a few times. You’re standing in front of the bus doors with a waxed bag in your hand. How wretched and weak the waxed bag in your hand looks! I don’t understand, wasn’t there another bag in the house? Your mother’s, sister’s, grandfather’s... their faces are stuck to your face. They’re breathing straight into your mouth. They move their hands back and forth and slap your cheeks with all their might. Why are they slapping you, why can’t they kiss your cheeks at least, instead of painfully slapping them? They’ve pressed their faces firmly on my face. It’d be better if they entered my mouth. I’m still confident that my mouth is the safest place, that no one in the military unit will find out that I hide my family in my mouth. When everyone is fast asleep at night, I’ll take them out, I’ll line them up on the blue camouflage bedding of my mesh base bed and I’ll share my thoughts with them, and then we’ll play war games together like little tin soldiers, and at dawn I will put them back in my mouth. I’ll hide them. Eeeeeeeeh, hurry up, soldier, you’re not expecting us to wait for you for hours, are you? Say goodbye and be done. You’re no longer a part of the outside world. Hurry up, say goodbye. The short lieutenant with crooked legs squealed like a pig annoyed at the heat. Dumbstruck waxed bag: sad and swaying in front of the open doors of the bus. Am I not talking to you? Are you not listening? Say something, too, sad swaying waxed bag. The engine of the bus starts with a sputter. Burning throat. A bag swaying in a kind breeze: the neck did not ward off the rope. The powerful kick of the lieutenant’s half-shoe on your back throws your body to the ground. Fall in! Foooorward, march! One, one, one, two, three, left, left, left, right, left