Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

Author:Lauren Groff
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781401396374
Publisher: Hyperion

OUR HUSBANDS COME home early from work one evening and tell us, grimly, that the barbarians are at the gates. The dictator has been useless, they say. When we press, they say that there are other forces at work; we should not worry our heads about it.

We wait. The pool is a blue stone inlaid in the ground, untouched. The monkeys get into the kitchens, leave floury imprints on the pianos, and we let them. The city itself seems to draw its tentacles in. Things are so quiet we can hear the distant sounds, the low dull explosions and the cracks of the guns. Some of our servants go home at night and do not return in the morning. We have difficulty finding coffee, then bread.

The dictator’s wife comes to sit with us on the overgrown lawn, the bougainvillea threatening to swallow the tennis court. She has been to the cathedral, she tells us, but the doors were closed. She found a side entrance to the priests’ house and found the priests at the kitchen table, eating toast, still in their pajamas. They would not look her in the eye. They would not give confession, she says. They silently refused.

She says this, her body still, this woman who jitters when calm. Never beautiful, she has become ugly with fatigue, her skin lined. Her daughter hides behind her chair, and we notice the girl’s mouth is the dictator’s own. One by one, she plucks out gray hairs from her mother’s head, and though her mother winces with each pluck, she allows it. We have little to offer the dictator’s wife now, except our silence and more tea.

I have dreams, the dictator’s wife starts to say. When she raises her face, her pupils have swallowed her irises. We are reminded again of a medium in mid-séance, of the plain, quiet widow she had once been in a Saint Louis parlor, limning a canvas with her paint and visions. I know everything he has done, she says.

In the middle of the night, a knock on the door, and we who have packed everything get into the cars and glide down the hill. The younger children are sleeping against our shoulders, and there is the smell of smoke in the air. Our husbands are grim and do not speak. We do not say good-bye to our remaining servants, or to the booze we cannot take home to our dry country. We do not say good-bye to the compound, our lovely houses, the pool in which we have spent so many of our years. The darkness swallows it all. The marina is protected by a line of our own officers with guns on their shoulders. If the natives know we are leaving, we do not see them in the night, and it would not matter, we cannot take them. In the distance there are terrible sounds.

When we are on the boat, we breathe again. Not one of us asks our husbands to fetch the dictator’s wife, who is alone in the pink palace on the hill, her daughter sleeping beside her.

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