 |
THE TRUE
ADVENTURES OF FRANZ KAFKA'S CAGE A cage went
in search of a bird.
-KAFKA Keep your
canary under lock and key. In Seattle, a suspicious-looking empty cage
was
observed lurking outside of a pet store by Elizabeth Bauman, a
registered
nurse, whose car had broken down one night on her way back from work.
Despondent
owing to the death of Isolda, his beloved canary, the opera tenor,
Arturo
Balderachi from Pisa, in a fit of rage threw her cage out of the window
in the
direction of the famous leaning tower. In New
York, seven violations have been
issued last month to an unkempt birdcage seen begging around town for
birds.
Finding
her husband, Francois, age sixty-nine, trying to stick his head into a
birdcage, Mme Santé, Wearing only a flimsy white nightgown ran out in
the
middle of the night into the streets of Paris to seek a doctor or a
priest. A
birdcage
belonging to an unknown person was found unattended by an alert usher
in the
first row of a cinema in Montevideo watching Alfred Hitchcock's movie
The
Birds. "I'm telling you, Angelita, the world has gone crazy," some
old lady was heard to mutter on the way out. The
birdcage
is lonely. It strokes itself with a bird feather and cries itself to
sleep
every night. After
finding an empty cage on his doorstep, Aaron Bosselaar, a schoolteacher
in
Antwerp, filed a complaint with the police against a dead Czech author
of
several incomprehensible books that only certifiable dingbats, like his
wife,
Laure-Anne, pretend to understand. Too
poor to
buy him a bird, the parents of little Alfred Krall gave him an empty
cage for
Christmas with a paper-cut of a parrot and told him to feed it crumbs
of angel
cake every night before going to sleep. While
the
bickering of two housewives over whose son broke the window of a
funeral parlor
was putting the judge to sleep, policeman brought into the courtroom a
birdcage
accused of propositioning a street sparrow to have a go at one of its
swings.
Roderigo, a
young surrealist poet, was reading in the park a poem he had just
composed and
which compares his love to "a cage full of wild beasts" to Amanda, an
aspiring ballet dancer in the tradition of Isadora Duncan, when a
flying pigeon
dropped its doo-doo on his black, curly hair and his green velvet
jacket.
Thinking
that the cage capsizing in the Seine contained a pair of lovebirds,
Théophile,
a tenderhearted orphan visiting Paris from Lunéville, jumped after it,
and not
knowing how to swim, drowned before he could be rescued. A bird
seen
fleeing on foot across the lawn with a cage in hot pursuit astonished a
party
of British swells who were playing croquet and sipping champagne on the
lawn of
a palatial country home, leaving them, in their advanced state of
inebriation,
short of words. Oh, my
God!
A cage hanging from the ceiling in a rented room occupied by a lodger
the
landlady claimed never to have seen. An extensive search of the
premises by the
police proved fruitless in locating any possessions or a suicide note
belonging
to the pitiful contraption made of wire. No one
has
yet researched the psychological effect an empty birdcage would have on
a
goldfish were it to be lowered in its aquarium, said Professor Sadoff
at the
imposing gathering of the Academy of Science, to which only one
graybeard in
attendance was seen to nod his head vigorously in agreement. It
occurred
to Chairman Mao one day to find out from his chief of secret police how
many
empty cages there were in China and whether they were being carried
about at
night by suspicious individuals he was not aware of or were they ghosts
of some
of his old party comrades whom he had imprisoned and tortured over the
years? After
robbing a bank in Kansas City, Garfield Jones, whose nickname was "Baby
Face," made himself unobtrusive in the lunch-hour crowd by carrying the
money in a birdcage which he had prudently cover d with a dark cloth
usually
used to put a bird to sleep at night. In
Andalusia, a matador by the name of Pepete astounded the spectators,
judges and
picadors by using a red birdcage as a muleta to further enrage the
charging
bull.
"Birdcages
of the world, free yourself from filthy birds," shouted the young
Peruvian
revolutionary as he was being led blindfolded before the firing squad. Walking
backwards on the street, the retired mailman, Kurt Brown, who had grown
even
more eccentric after he was fired from his job for having concealed
decades of
undelivered mail in his basement, met a birdcage going in the opposite
direction. Little
ones,
the cage whispered to some chickadees, look at the lovely swing, ladder
and
mirror I have for you. You'll live like a prince and princess, waking
every
morning in your palace to a breakfast of golden seeds and the
admiration of
every cat in the neighborhood as you take turns splashing in your bath
and
warbling to each other. Bracing
itself on the parapet of a schoolhouse high above the street, the cage
waited
for paper planes that come flying out of open windows on long, warm
June
afternoons when teachers doze off at their desks, to ask them, as they
circle
in the air, what should it do next? Its
tiller
damaged, the fearless cage sailing across the Atlantic to catch a bird
in the
jungles of the Amazon that was reputed to be extraordinarily stupid,
abandoned
its voyage and returned safely to its home in a fire station in Bremen.
In a
village
in Transylvania, a gypsy woman found an empty cage and filled it with
tarot
cards and white mic in order to mystify and entice the gullible and
drive away
those who see the devil’s hand at work at the country fairs. "If you
were
a prison that didn't have a single prisoner wouldn't you yearn
for one?" said the cage to the blue sky as it lay on the railroad track
expecting Eurostar to come its way instead of a local rattler full of
caged
chickens and boxes of fresh eggs. And what did you, dear Madame, expect
the
cage to look like after fifty years of searching for a bird? Waiting
for years
by the side of some road to hitch a ride, sleeping under bridges,
drowning
one's disappointment in dives from Hong Kong to San Francisco, meeting
jewel
thieves, burglars, bank robbers, fortune-tellers and listening to their
advice
without ever enticing one damn bird. "It's
because you kept searching," a wise man in India told the distraught
cage.
"If you had stayed in Aunt Zelda's kitchen all these years, one day
when
the window was open a bird would have flown in on its own
and made the acquaintance of your charming self." [First
published in Boulevard (2007)] Charles
Simic: The Life of Images
|