The Birds

The endless winter after my parents died, our sleepy village received a new music teacher, a small, unthreatening woman who did not portend strange happenings. I was living with my aunt Adela at the time in her small apartment overlooking the town square, occupying the second floor of a white-shuttered colonial house with a black stove-top pipe for coal smoke in the winter and a rusty balcony that grew heavy with a great shaggy beard of icicles the first snowfall. The apartment was colder than my parents’ house, more cramped, filled with dust, and never lit by more than slant-light beams that concealed as much as they revealed. My first year at the local high school had just begun that past fall, and the first semester had, quite uncharacteristically, not gone well – I was usually an ace in my subjects. That season I was content to mix and mingle with the attitude of the times. As the wind cold wore down the autumn branches to their last barren leaf, the village market thrummed with noisy bustling crowds formed of atomized human sprites cocooned in headphones, screens, and other blinking devices. Ditching school I would filter through the shops myself, ears firmly plugged with my own music, insensate to the pulsating rhythm around me, and steadily shopped my way back and forth over the counters hawking candied pork and jellied liver until my belly ached and all my money was gone and I had no choice but to stand outside in the cold drizzly rain, drenched and shivering in what I was quite surprised to discover were my own tears, and wait patiently for Aunt Adela to take me home to the silence and the slant-light beams and the cold dead recumbent dust.

The music teacher arrived just past Thanksgiving, though from where, we didn’t know. Recently the school had a string of bad luck with music teachers, unfortunates who lasted only a few months before departing for reasons invariably malevolent, including divorce, boredom, and one case of insanity. Naturally this caused rumors to circulate that the position was cursed, although I heard Aunt Adela sniff more than once that the town air was enough to drive anyone insane. Regardless, the morning the final music teacher, Mr. Maples, turned in his papers (Aunt Adela read the report - he cited “disagreeable climate, unfavorable minds, and bland food”), our new music teacher appeared in all her glory at the train station. An old woman, bent over, with thick glasses like bottle caps, obscuring her blue eyes and making them look like giant azure saucers. Covered in shawls, woven and knitted trestles, waving down her hunchback like a wizened mane or a witch’s cassock whipping in the moonlit air from her broom. A small, almost girlish mouth. Snow-white hair, tied back in a golden ribbon. All her possessions she carried in a jumble of leather trunks, agèd things covered in yellowed stamps from foreign countries depicting exotic scenes with tigers and pharaohs and floods, which led many to believe she had taken the train in from afar and gotten off at the wrong stop. In this scenario, her acceptance of the open teaching position was a happy accident. Others refused this just-so story, myself among them, and pointed to her strange accent, childish air, and long, silvery hair braided back in the old Slavic style to contend that she was Russian royalty in lonely exile, old mistress Anastasia, wandering through the centuries till she stumbled across our village in search of a final resting place. The winter was long that year and we took what we wanted from the truth. I myself recognized her exile; I saw it the first moment I laid eyes on her, through the keyhole of our apartment. The landlord had let out the room across the hall to the music teacher, but I did not know that then: how I would have thanked him! Dust stirs, and all that plays distantly from me becomes more real than air or fire: she’s coming up the stairs now, novel oddity in the night, strange sounds – what is that? Who could that be? So long I’ve been alone in here – see her struggling up the steps, see her fumble at the door – is that how I look, skin gone so pale and papery, spiderweb wrinkles creasing my face in sadness? Yet an undimmed blue-bell flame burns in her bright eyes. An uncertain pain grips my stomach. You have to speak to her, says a voice inside my guts. Resolute, I decide against waiting, and turn the doorknob. Aunt Adela’s hand stops the door cold. Out past bedtime, she hisses. Back to your room, quit frowning, you’ll see her tomorrow at school. I won’t hear any more of it. 

Came now wondrous stirrings of renewed life, blossom of my late and final childhood, those halcyon days of her music lessons: days of marauding fantasy not to last. She began inauspiciously. As snow drifts deepened outdoors, the school learned quickly that the new music teacher had no standard training in music education – for some, this explains the inexplicable in her behavior. As if benumbed by terror at her new vocation,  for the first week the music teacher didn’t teach a note or speak to the students at all, but rather, crept around them from afar, hiding behind music stands and kettle drums, peeking out to observe our movements with shrieking laughs of delight admixed with fear. Only I could coax her down the tiered stages of the orchestra to the conductor’s podium, which she climbed, tremulously, shaking like a frail bird, to finally raise her wand overhead and lead us in song. When it came time to choose our instruments, she laid them in a pile before us and danced around them as if in a trance, before, without warning, she leapt backwards like a cat and pounced on a trombone and proceeded to wail the most horrible noises on its embarrassed brass, before gesturing for us all to join. Each class for her was a solemn and obscure ritual, at once sacred and absurd. Too vital to be left to chance, yet too childish to be taken seriously. And still we were not getting any better. The principal noticed – all week he spent his lunch hour smashing his nose against the glass door of our orchestra room, desperate for any sign of failure. The other music teachers had been luminaries of bureaucratic decorum compared to this one; he wanted her gone, and the annual Christmas recital would be her test.

It was about this time I began to notice the music teacher’s affinity for animals. In her quest for ever better musical innovations, her lone adventure against mediocrity, she took the wild cats living about the school grounds as the first of her experiments. Through a series of complex lures, tricks, and outright bribes, she gradually recruited a small cadre of feline admirers that attended class with us and listened to our songs. Struggling through our notes, we would raise our eyes to the conductor for the rhythm, and catch her bottle-cap eyes staring up nervously at the cats in the back row, who waved their tails in indifference. For three nights straight, she remained at school, locked in her office with the cats, careening with an unheard-of fury against the recalcitrant animals, denouncing them in a spitting rage for their unhelpfulness, all of which they accepted with the same implacable acceptance as we students took on the changing seasons. Little did we realize what unnatural and ungovernable urges were growing even then inside the music teacher.

But the beginning of the end came with the first shipment of birds’ eggs.

Through her overseas contacts in Antioch, Smyrna, and Kadesh, themselves far-flung outposts of her deeper contacts along the trade routes strung backwards towards Samarkand, Bukhara, and Urgench, the music teacher procured a variety of birds’ eggs that stretched from the familiar to the bizarre. She roosted them in the front of the orchestra room, in a series of long shelves nailed into the blackboard. Soon the eggs were chirping and rolling daily. Transfixed, when we heard the music teacher was looking for volunteers for an extra credit assignment dedicated to hastening the hatching of the birds, we leapt at the chance. The workings of the assignment were obscure. The gestational science and symbolic foreplay governing the interchange between music and life was a delicate art known only to the music teacher, which came to her in a rhythm that would determine the beats of our life that season. Our assignment was music, unceasing music. For a whole week we serenaded the eggs duomo forte from dawn to dusk without ceasing, till the second shift of students would take over and play bravissimo suave from evening star to first sunbreak. Our fingers flew and our lungs stretched as mountains do, as clouds do, when they bend and cover earth. We did not mind the backbreaking labor of those days, nor notice the passing of time. In fact time seemed to slow down, to stretch out as cascading ripples, skipping stones, hitting and splashing and resounding each moment again, and again, and again, but anew. We joyed to hear the chirping voices grow and multiply. We thrilled with terrible ecstasy to hear them gush to a shrieking pandemonium. When at last they burst forth, we greeted them with howls of frenzied agony.

Downy blues, soft lilacs, vesper’d grays, rising like smoke their mellifluous wings, rising all around me, even now through the hazy tin memories: the birds were rising through the orchestra room, and they were taking our melodies with them. Outside the windows of our orchestra room, the snow bit harder each day, and the birch trees withered under the glare of the moon. Inside, every day was brighter and stranger than the last. When the birds hatched, the music teacher showed them a deference that amazed us students. Sparrows, mockingbirds, finches, parrots or partridges or Balkan pigeons, birds of a thousand spangled colors feather-flung across the species rainbow, they all roosted in the tall round of our orchestra room as if we were the drum tower of a great medieval magician. When we picked up our instruments, clutches of finches landed on our music stands to listen. When we blew a cue or rushed a lead, squawking choruses of discontent thundered down from the rafters. And when we played in time, in tune, in sequence, the birds floated serenely overhead, as if they were the soft surface of the ocean, and all our storming furies the folding fading impetus of the currents flowing majestically beneath. Seemingly without the slightest effort, without the slightest alteration to our will, we were being transformed. Our skills multiplied as if by merely tasting a thing, we had it forever. The music teacher led us in a new song, and we mastered it that day. Pressed against the glass, the principal, his face aghast, could not believe his eyes.

One bird in particular has stayed in my mind: an enormous albatross with wide wings, its eyes glassy and translucent. It was a solemn peregrinator, a lonely wanderer in the vein of Cain, full of distant and abstract purpose as it circled and curved slowly above our heads. When the music teacher tapped her conducting wand for class to commence, the albatross was the first to descend and listen, perching over her shoulder on the top of the blackboard. They possessed an uncanny similarity. Its wings and feathers seemed to be made of the same material as the music teacher and her white smock; when caught up in song, it wrapped its wings tight around its chest, exactly as our music teacher. Even the hair, wind-born and braided down our music teacher’s back, had its counterpart in the white-tufted feathers of the albatross’s tail. When sneaking glances during class, I could not resist the sensation that the albatross was somehow more real than our music teacher, and that, in fact, what we took for our music teacher was nothing but a stuffed and animated version of the albatross. I never shared my hypothesis with anyone. Nevertheless it felt uncanny to watch the albatross eat from our music teacher’s plate, a privilege it shared with no other bird. 

As the Christmas recital approached, the whole orchestra thrummed with a new-found confidence, and so we were shaken one afternoon to tramp into class and find the music teacher’s podium taken over by a river crane. The majestic bird tapped her beak on the wood impatiently and waved for us to sit down as if nothing was amiss. Blinking, our hearts rabbit-pounding, the students spread out and assumed their normal positions. At last someone spotted her – a horrified whisper rippled through the crowd. The music teacher was far overhead, perched in the rafters with the birds. That day our lesson went smoothly, the crane was a capable conductor (albeit one extremely exacting), we suffered nothing on that account. The music teacher even made a point of attempting an intimate connection with us, following our songs and leading all the birds in response. But we could not help feeling betrayed. We thought she was breeding assistants – not a replacement. In our gut, we knew something horrible was coming.

One day I arrived in class to find my seat was taken by a pot of sparrows. They frittered over my music sheets with their beaks and cut up my careful margin notes, twittering in impatient disgust. They perched on my music stand and loosened their throats in preparation and sang my trumpet lines in complex harmonies that made me ashamed in my inferiority. When I approached, they fell silent and stared. I lowered my face, bright-hot in embarrassment, and retreated back to the wall, where a small group of other children similarly rebuffed was already gathering. Far up the music teacher looked down on us in pity, bottle-cap eyes shining down, filled with tears. But when the river crane whipped up her beak and the new orchestra fell into a sublime music unlike anything we had achieved before, the music teacher flapped her arms like wings for joy at the wondrous creation, and even lifted her head back and let out, from deep in her throat, a garbled squawk. So when we were assigned to stay after and clean up the bird droppings, the music teacher looked on, sad, but did nothing. Our own instruments we laid aside, our memory of how to play; it faded overnight, like a dream. Dreams were unneeded – we had lost our advocate in the rafters.

The night before the Christmas Recital the whole village was nervous and none could sleep. Rumors had filtered out of the school of the happenings there, stories of unclean hybrids, bungled transformations, and all manners of perversions and deceptions, rumors that had set the town on edge. That night, shop-keepers phoned the central security line in a panic and reported strange shapes moving through the square, shapes that glided over the snow without touching down, as ghosts move over water. The dark woods between houses throbbed with laughter, and more than one break-in was reported to end in bloodshed. When the principal picked the lock of the orchestra room, surprising the birds when they least expected it, his was only one of a thousand crimes that night.

The principal unveiled his wooden ruler and brandished his sword in a merciless dance of death against the avian towers of defenseless slumberers. A whirlwind of feathers uprose in screams of pain, as the principal laughed and struck wildly here, now there, climbing the rafters with left hand while he swung and smote with ruler in right. Caught completely by surprise, the birds bolted for an open skylight and poured out into the night, where they scattered and disappeared in the stars. All the while the music teacher flapped her arms and tried to join them, squawked piteously between gritted tears that streamed down her face, until she too at last admitted defeat, and crawled down to rejoin earth. There the principal stood, sweating, his thick chest huffing and puffing, standing tall, triumphant.  

Without her orchestra, and with no students left who remembered how to play, the Christmas Recital was a disaster. Everyone in town showed up, and no one played. Jeers and boos filled the stale air while the crowd waited for an answer, and when none came, they left. This defeat crushed the music teacher. No one needed to tell her it was all her fault – she assumed it for herself. She abandoned the school, and died several months soon after.  

Spring thaw came. The ground melted, and people moved on with the world. All of a sudden, thorny problems stuck solid seemed a little more flexible, a pinch less intractable, and imperceptibly, they began to treat their worries with an arm’s-length disdain. They spoke amicably about plans for the summer holiday. They forgot the music teacher. I did not – at least immediately. Spring rolled into summer, summer into another fall, and though I tried to keep time one way or another, whether turns of the moon or photographs, rituals or promises, I too began to think of her less and less, until I thought of her barely at all. The only remnant of her presence in my life was a single thought, a single resolution that came to me that night at the music recital: I must leave.

As soon as I was eighteen, I left my village. When I walked out, there was no one there to greet me, and no one left behind to chase after, but my heart ached, and I was glad on it. Glad as I am now, anew, breathing heavily against the horizon, the falling sun, and the woodland plain blooming deep with remorseless choices etched in bright ash and silence.