Wild Tales by Nikolai Haitov

Author:Nikolai Haitov [Haitov, Nikolai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780720618198
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Little Black Bird

I’ve seen a good few funerals in my time : with music and without, with soldiers and policemen too, with speeches and without, with one priest, with twelve priests and with no priest at all, but there’s one funeral that bring tears to my eyes whenever I think of it: the funeral of the little black bird. The bird itself was nothing special: it was black and had an orange beak. Just an ordinary common-or-garden blackbird. It wasn’t one of your songbirds neither, like as usually get put in cages. He was a wild blackbird and he had a hen to keep him company. A fellow from Bachkovo had brought them for Gogosha’s grandma so she could rub her warts with ‘fat from a black bird’, but Gogosha took pity on the birds and didn’t give them to her. He put them in a cage instead and he hung the cage just inside his shop.

There was a fair number of shops round the square and some had cages with birds in them – only they were all songbirds.

No one had ever seen blackbirds in a cage before, and Gogosha soon had half the market coming round to his cobbler’s shop for a look: koundouri-makers with their hammers, butchers with horsetails, barbers with scissors and fcoza-sellers with their copper pitchers – everyone you could possibly think of.

‘What have you got them for?’ they all asked.

‘To pick my lice,’ Gogosha told them.

Everyone laughed, but not Gogosha. He was like that. He’d tell a joke with a dead straight face, but if he said something serious he’d split his sides. So everyone thought he was joking. There was chuckling and laughter all round, but afterwards it turned out Gogosha hadn’t been joking at all. Next morning we saw he’d had his head shaved. ‘All off!’ he’d told Stati the barber. ‘Bald as a coot!’

His shop was just a couple of doors away from mine and a week or so later he called in to see me.

‘Kosta,’ he said, ‘come and see the birds at work.’

I went off with him and he pressed his head against the cage. The birds stretched out their necks, shoved their little heads through the wire and started hammering away at his bald pate with their beaks. There was nothing there, but they went hammering away just like they was pecking up lice.

‘How did you teach them a trick like that?’ I asked.

‘For a whole week I had them pecking crumbs off my head,’ he said. ‘And when they got going it seemed like they was pecking up the worms that were gnawing at my innards and I felt so good inside, so nice and light, I forgot about the wickedness of the world and the poverty at home….’

For the next three or four days there was always a crowd hanging round Gogosha’s shop trying to get a look. The slump had us in its grip. Craftsmen had no work and nothing to occupy their time. The peasants were out of cash and were hardly buying a thing.

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