THE FEATHER OF THE BLACK ANGEL

“Is that blood in the inkwell?”

Adolf rolls up his prison pants and shows Rudolf the self-inflicted cuts in his calves. 

“They wouldn’t give me enough ink for all that’s to be written! So I mixed in my own blood.”

He allows Rudolf to gasp, then adds, “Besides, the feather of the Black Angel works best with blood. Here, have a go!”

“I’m an aviator not a writer, words don’t come easy to me,” Rudolf’s reluctant to write.

“The words won’t come from you, but from the Black Angel!”

Rudolf shakes his head. Adolf can be outlandish. But is he now flipping out? The Beer Hall Putsch was fun, but here they are now, jailed up in Landsberg. And Adolf’s take on their predicament? He’s writing a book that is supposed to change the future of mankind! The old fashioned way, with a large feather, not unlike a half-demented Medieval monk.

Rudolf dips the feather in the sordid blood-ink mixture and when it’s soaked enough bloody ink up its narrow tube, he brings it close to the next blank space on the notebook Adolf had titled ‘Mein Kampf’. Not even sparing a thought, he scribbles:

"We shouldn’t occupy ourselves merely with the breeding of dogs, but also with the purity of our own race."

Adolf stares at what his cellmate’s just jotted down. Rudolf, too, looks at the written words and tries to distill the significance of what’s come out of the tip of that feather.

Finally, Adolf speaks.

“Great words, Hess! In the right hands, the feather of the Black Angel is able to write mankind's next chapters. It wrote false bibles, declarations of holy wars, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ - oh, so many young lasses were burned at the stake thanks to that one! Every word that perturbed history has been the product of this very feather. Machiavelli got hold of it too. Mightier than the sword, it pitted man against man, revealing who’s strong and who’s dead. Who's serious and who's trivial. It’s the will of the greatest god of all times, the Black Angel.” 

With that he holds up the feather and observes it with fearful admiration. A drop of ink-blood hangs on its tip reluctant to fall off, glittering eerily in the little light the cell window allows in. Adolf sees in it a reflection of his face, distorted into a bubble.

“Our luck," he goes on with his solemn monologue, "Himmler found this feather when he and the boys ransacked the Communists headquarters in Munich. Them Communists revered it. For that scum Marx wrote his ‘Manifesto’ with this very feather. It had been doing the rounds in Germany for a while: Wagner jotted his fiery notes with it, and in Nietsche’s hand it declared God dead, no less. Now that it’s ours, we shall prevail in the darkness to come!”

***

“The most incredible object ever sold! The last feather of the Black Angel! History’s most notorious bastards held it between their fingers! €50’s the starting price!”

No interest is shown (who even wants to become the next bastard in history!) and the crowd thins out, so the auctioneer talks up his angelic ware:

“It’s the last known relic from the Age of Angels! This feather is the very personification of the malediction of the Angels on the Descendants of the Ape!”

He eyes the last potential customers departing, unimpressed, and I find myself alone listening to this ancient salesman. Long beard and shabby brown robes make him look like he fell off some long-lost fairy-tale book.

“Don’t leave just yet, Mon Ami,” he talks directly to me, “Back in the day, people would’ve killed or died to lay their hands on this very feather. Nowadays nobody believes in anything anymore! I’ll let you have it for forty euros, below the asking price!”

It seems like he’s been trying for quite a while to rid himself of that feather. It is sealed in an old wooden box with a glass display window on top. I feel quite the idiot when I actually accept to take it, letting go of the forty euros he asked for it. I didn't even bargain to go lower, it's just not in me to haggle.

“Going, going, gone!” he raises his voice to make his successful sale known to all, crashing the gavel on the makeshift woodworm infested table, shaking it. 

“For just €40, Mon Ami, you’re now the proud owner of the most calamitous curse ever inflicted on Man!”

I don’t believe a word he says. Neither can I believe that I've just relieved myself of forty precious euros for an old feather in a wooden box. But I traveled far to reach this remote corner of France, and was delighted to find out that this legendary clandestine open-air flea-market really exists. I’m not going to leave empty-handed, I say to myself.

That market wound itself onto my family lore, until it became part of those personal myths and legends and mystical places our parents and grandparents tell us about over and over, Although we don't believe them, they become exquisite treasured memories we carry along from childhood well into adulthood. My grandpa, half-brained as he may have been, said he had once bought a two-headed horse from that market, that could cross the English Channel, galloping on top of the water. That’s how my mother’s side of the family had ended up in England, he maintained, riding that horse. Oh, well.

Then again, the assassin my dad hired to kill his cheating wife, my dreadful step-mother, confided that his murderous dagger was magical – no crime committed with it would ever be unraveled. And indeed it never was - my father never paid for the blood of that woman and died a peaceful death in his own bed, only a heart-attack to blame. A bell rang in my head, when the assassin also said he had got that dagger from that same mythical market my grandpa often blabbered abut. So, needless to say, I always wanted to go and have a look for myself - check this market out, if it even exists, perhaps buy something special from it. A two-headed fish that can climb mountains perhaps. To sort of continue the family tradition. And satisfy my curiosity.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t ever jot a word with that feather,” the auctioneer switches from a theatrical to a fatherly tone, as he hands my acquisition over to me, “For it’s Black Angel that selects the words, not the fingers of the man holding the feather. The Angel writes what he wants, we're mere pawns in his hands, and whatever’s written shall be done!”

Hushed voices spread like wildfire throughout the market. “La police! La police!” The gendarmerie apprehend a couple of hawkers, while scores of others lift their wares and vanish almost magically, just to set up again elsewhere in town for the story to repeat itself. Even the apprehended ones, all they've got to do is line the officers' pockets - just a couple of tenners will do - and then rejoin the rest of the group. It’s as comical as it’s practical.

Back in my car, I place the box with the feather on the passenger seat and set off through endless country roads back to Paris, where I now live and work as a decent investment banker. As decent as an investment banker can be, that is.

A silver Rover overtakes me and comes to a halt, blocking my way. Four Asian men emerge. My blood freezes when one of them digs his hand inside his pocket. A gun, I think. Instead it’s hundred dollar bills, rolled up. He smashes my passenger window with his elbow, leans in, grabs the feather and throws the rolled up dollars inside.

“We arrived late to buy fedel from market,” he tells me, “so we buy fedel from you instead.”

They disappear quicker than they appeared. Relieved, I grab the money. More than enough to have the window fixed and repay the forty euros I forked out for the feather. Much more. I can probably give myself an all-inclusive holiday in Guadaloupe on top of paying all the incurred damages, my mind wanders. That’s when I spot the Huawei. The paying thief must’ve dropped his cellphone off his jumper-pocket when he leaned inside my car to snatch the box with the feather.

I grab the phone and scroll up WhatsApp. But I’m none the wiser, it’s all in Chinese! A photo posted by a white-bearded elderly Asian man shows that familiar feather that for some miserly twenty minutes belonged to me.

Google Translate to the rescue! Soon enough, Chinese becomes (bad) English. Not perfect English, but enough to follow the overall thread of the conversation.

MING: “Buy Black Angel’s feather from French market!” the old man had written.

LIU: “You now believe in angels, grandpa!? Haha!” the phone owner replied.

MING: “Angels! Funny, right? Not scientific term. It’s what ancient people call them! Some modern people too. Before Age of Ape, evolution favored the Great Birds. They were intelligent life-form, had twenty-three senses, not just our mere five – or six. They ruled world, built cities, great civilizations, they fly and see world from above, great advantage for building cities. But when the Apes, our forefathers, evolved too, goodwill between Ape and Bird – or Man and Angel if you like – not longlasting. Man finally wins, destroys all Bird offsprings. Birdkind weakness is fragility of its eggs. Last Bird-King, Black Angel revenges. On deathbed, he infuses into his last fluttering feather his seventeenth sense, the sense of revengeful-pleasure-by-will-on-others’-minds, to torment Mankind forever…”

LIU: “We get feather. Then what?” The owner of the phone does not seem too interested in pursuing the details of his grandpa's fanciful tale-of-all-tales, just wants to know what precisely his job is.

MING: “Father-of-Beast lives in blood vial I already gave you, I developed it during my years in exile. He needs meet Mother-of-Beast at my old secret workplace. I created her before got fired. I’ll send you address later. Write letter in blood: instructions to join Father-of-Beast with Mother-of-Beast to create New-Baby-Beast. When New-Baby-Beast is born, world will cry. Men will hide in their holes, be afraid of each other. Economy collapses, world gets weak and cheap. Then we buy world! We not forever slaves in plastic-wares factories! We becomes masters!”

LIU: “How I write instructions? What I write?”

MING: “You need not know. The feather will know! Black Angel's soul and seventeenth sense are still in it. You only hold feather, it will do the rest. Whoever opens letter is compelled to obey…”

I jolt at the sound of a toilet flushing. Some people do have taste in choosing their damn phone ringtones!

I quickly copy and paste the new message into Google Translate which instantly gives me the English version of the message that has just come through:

MING: “Grandson, here is the address: ‘Institute of Experimental Virology, Wuhan’.