The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  Not a bit of it.

  Parrots are not well known for their prophetic abilities. They live for hundreds of years and are the owners of exceedingly good memories, but they cannot think forward for more than two ticks.

  The next theory of the scream.

  As is always the case in times of upheaval, a troupe of actors was wandering around Prague, looking for digs. The company was led by one Robert Browne. They had turned up to spend the winter in Prague after a long European tour which included moderately successful performances at the Frankfurt Fair and Heidelberg. The actors mooched around town looking for the best eating-houses and arguing over whether it was better to stick to their production of The Tempest or to introduce into the repertoire The History of Susanna, and, of course, fighting over who was to play what in which.

  Could it have been a certain conversation, overheard by the bird, that caused its cry of distress?

  Just before supper in the Lesser Hall, the parrot was seated on the stone sill of one of the slit windows. Beneath him, Robert Browne, manager of the troupe, was listening to an actor who thought he should be playing the part of Trinculo in The Tempest:

  ‘Robert. I’ve had the most wonderful idea for Trinculo. If you will let me play the part, I thought it would be a good idea for Trinculo to make his first entrance with a parrot on his head.’

  ‘I think not, Arthur. I don’t want anything to distract from the text at that point.’

  ‘It would be very realistic. We could borrow the parrot that belongs to the Queen’s household.’

  ‘The theatre is supposed to be a garden of illusion. Anything real would be a distraction.’

  ‘It would get a laugh.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  Did the parrot emit his famous scream at this point? Not at all.

  Rather, he emitted a disgusted groan that he had picked up from a crowd disappointed at the last-minute cancellation of a public execution. He managed to fly, notwithstanding, to the safety of the rafters, lest his greatest fear be realised and he be put in their production of The Tempest.

  Just at this point, history intervened and saved him from one torment only to present him with another.

  Unbeknownst to the Winter King and Queen or any of their household, on the cold night of November 10th, 1619, warmed by a German stove in a small house on the banks of the Danube, a young man slept and dreamed that mathematics was the sole key to the understanding of nature. His name was René Descartes. He spent all – or almost all – that winter meditating on this notion. Then came the news that the Duke of Bavaria and his Catholic army were about to march on the Winter King and Queen of Bohemia. Curiosity caused René Descartes, educated by Jesuits, to re-join his old regiment in order to see a little action.

  And so it came about that Descartes, innocent symbol of reason, skulking in the back rows of the soldiery, watched and participated as little as possible as the Battle of the White Mountain was fought outside Prague. The battle put to flight the newly ensconced King and Queen, smashed the spirit of Bohemia and destroyed the unity of magic and science which had developed as one under the liberal auspices of Rudolfo and his successors. Magic and technology were, from then on, to go their separate ways.

  Elizabeth and Frederick piled what they could into two carriages: children, a few staff, monkeys, the crystal christening gift and other sundry valuables. In the whirlwind rush to leave, they left behind, by accident, the Order of the Garter and the parrot.

  Meanwhile, among the sweaty sergeants, bone-aching mercenaries and big-chinned Hapsburgs, marched one mathematically inclined soldier with a forgettable face, thoughtfully chewing on a piece of dried beef. The raggle-taggle, victorious army hobbled up the steep road leading to the castle walls. At the same time, a servant of the fleeing royals, who had been sent back to retrieve the Order of the Garter, but unable to find it, had grabbed the parrot in lieu, came running down through the ranks of the ascending army, holding the parrot aloft like a green-and-gold banner.

  And so, for a brief moment, they came face to face. The master of rationalism and the parrot.

  The parrot screamed and it was indeed the same disturbing and terrifying sound that had rent the air in the Orinoco basin when the earth split and a hand poked out and a white figure ran into the forest. The sound reverberated for days along the banks of the Vtlava, making the citizens of Prague shake their heads and wiggle their fingers around in their ears.

  And it was thus that the man whose hidden presence in the conquering army might well have been their secret weapon, the man who contributed to the rout of a certain sort of imagination, the man who later claimed that common sense was the prime mover of men, the man who thought he was there because he was, or who was there because he thought he was, wandered into Prague in search of nothing more profound than a pork sausage on rye with mustard.

  Thus was reason born, by chance, out of the dark disorder of war. The parrot had intuitively recognised the danger of a man who believed that animals were automatons and that parrots ceased to exist when they were asleep. But reason tells us reason has its limits, thought the parrot. And he was so delighted with his own wit, that he let out an involuntary laugh which had the servants searching all night for an intruder.

  The parrot, ruffled by his moves around Europe, finally settled into unhappy exile with the rest of Elizabeth and Frederick’s household in an apartment in The Hague which belonged to Prince Henry of Nassau. Later, the exiled family moved into a draughty and gloomy palace on the river near Leiden.

  The Dutch phase of the parrot’s life proceeded uneventfully until the day in 1640 when, out of the blue, there was a loud knocking on the palace doors. Who should be standing on the doorstep, but René Descartes. Fortunately, the parrot’s cage was covered and he slept with his beak tucked under his wing, unaware that his greatest nightmare (not including The Tempest) had sidled into the palace to discuss mathematics with the young princesses. When he awoke to see the unwelcome visitor he gave a dismal squawk. Nobody heeded his warning, although from around then mind and matter started to divide, body and soul to separate and science and magic to march in opposite directions.

  The princesses of the household were shabby, handsome and gifted. The eldest, Princess Elizabeth, studied Cartesian philosophy until her nose went red. Descartes himself said that he had never met anyone who had such a grasp of his writings. However, soon she fell in love and had an affair with one of her ladies-in-waiting and Descartes sought solace (and financial reward) at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden. Despite himself, the parrot had picked up the rudiments of analytic geometry. He secretly took emetics to rid himself of the affliction. On foggy nights, before his cage was covered, he asked himself where rationalism had come from.

  During this time the bird was lost in thought. What he thought about was the written word. Books had become the truth. The written word had become proof. Laws were built on books which contained precedent. People were killed in their name. Confession, word of mouth, rumour, gossip, chattiness and oratory had all lost their place in the hierarchy of power. Passports verified. Documents condemned. Signatures empowered. Books were the storage place of memory. Books were written to contradict other books.

  The parrot, a natural representative of the oral tradition, began to sob. He used the sob he had heard in Lisbon of a young girl whose lover had been drowned at sea. He was fed up with the cobbled streets and castles, grey, snowy skies and the written word. He began to long for the chattering waters of the Essequibo River, the hot humid smells of the bush and the celestial choirs of humming howler monkeys. As solace, he often reproduced for himself the deep silence of the forests before words swarmed over the earth like cushi ants, the piccolo fluting call of a certain bird and the rushing of a thousand rivers over the rocks. He was unspeakably homesick.

  And so when two of the sons of Frederick and Elizabeth, named Rupert and Maurice, discussed venturing to the Caribbean to seek elephants and rose-emeralds, the p
arrot, who was now allowed the freedom of the palace, decided to stow away.

  In 1649, The Antelope was rigged up in the port of Rotterdam. Two years later the ship set sail with the parrot hiding in the cook’s cabin where he dined to the sound of rushing waters and creaking timbers. Near the Virgin Islands, a squalling hurricane upturned the ship. Rupert landed but Maurice disappeared. As soon as the parrot felt the familiar, warm uplift of air over the Orinoco he relaxed on the wind and allowed the sun-heated breezes to carry him east. He found his way to a region, now known as Berbice, and for a long time, kept his head down in a mango tree, trying to make sense of his experiences.

  The parrot had brought back with him:

  a) Shakespeare’s voice.

  b) The tumultuous roar of a Dutch crowd on April 28th, 1613.

  c) The sound of René Descartes scraping his plate with his spoon.

  d) The scratch of Rembrandt’s etching needle.

  e) The heartrending sob of the Portuguese girl whose lover had drowned.

  None of it was any use except the sob.

  It was 1652. The parrot was almost dozing off when he heard two men conversing beneath where he sat in a tree. The speaker was one Père de la Borde, a Jesuit priest. He was talking to a Dutch merchant.

  ‘The Indians are dreamy and melancholy. They sit silent for whole days at a time. They don’t care about the past or the future. They get angry when I try to explain to them about Paradise because they do not want to have to die before they go there. I can’t seem to persuade them to leave their present goods for future ones. They know nothing about either ambition or anxiety. What can I do? They are lazy, inconstant and wayward.’

  He was addressing his remarks to Abraham van Peere, a tall Dutchman with an emaciated face, wrinkled hands and a spattering of freckles, who cursed the muddy banks on which they stood. Mould exploded in spectra of colour on his leather uppers. Rottenness ambushed his nose. He had arrived from Holland to build a life as a merchant. The priest continued.

  ‘I shall probably be accompanying Père Meland, another Jesuit brother, to Santa Fe de Bogota,’ continued Père de la Borde. ‘He is a fine man. He had correspondence with René Descartes, the philosopher mathematician who died in Sweden recently. Père Meland is going to introduce the ideas of Descartes in a series of lectures at the Jesuit College there. Descartes’ work Meditations which he converted to scholastic form will be the main topic of his lectures.

  Ah well, how were those two men to distinguish one more parrot scream amongst the thousands that reverberate through the Orinoco basin and the Amazonas.

  Time passed. It was clear to the bird that ideas from Europe were gaining ground in his own territory. This realisation was reinforced when a chartered vessel from New York arrived in Georgetown. It was now the year 1800. The parrot watched suspiciously as a cargo of canvas palaces and painted forests, cardboard trees, crowns, daggers, sceptres and chains was unloaded. The strolling players had arrived from North America, having toured the islands first.

  Intimations of predestination should have warned the parrot to steer clear. His appetite for fruit, however, overcame his trepidation. They fed him. The actors, a group of bearded German Jews who also played the female roles, began to rehearse as they chewed on mango seeds and cast them aside. On the first night of their concert party, a furious fight broke out between the ‘female’ singers and the orchestra. The bearded actresses hitched up their gowns over their hips, revealing filthy pantaloons, and began a regular boxing match. It was decided to dispense with the orchestra. They would do excerpts from The Tempest.

  The parrot was snatched once more from a real tree and chained to a cardboard one. Every now and then he released his sob. As Prospero came forward to deliver his final epilogue, the bemused audiences heard two voices speaking at once:

  … now I want

  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;

  And my ending is despair,

  Unless I be relieved by prayer,

  Which pierces so, that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  As you from crimes would pardon’d be,

  Let your indulgence set me free.

  At the end of the tour in 1801, the parrot, wings clipped and wearing an ornamental chain on one leg, set off wearily for a new life in North America.

  The Fable of the Two Silver Pens

  I am writing these words with a silver pen, or rather a silvery-looking pen. This year, on my birthday, my husband gave it to me as a present. In fact, it’s probably stainless steel but a handsome pen all the same, both beautiful and business-like, made by a firm of pen-makers centuries old.

  Usually I write on a personal computer but for a while I had suffered from writer’s block, bogged down with notes and discarded ideas. Initially, I took up the pen to see if writing in longhand would help. Although the pen was supposed to be no more than an elegant symbol of my trade, I must say I enjoyed the physical act of writing once more and was pleased with the result. By using the pen I seemed to tap into some hitherto inaccessible source of energy and truth. For several days I wrote like a fiend. I found that, with incredible speed, I had completed a short story.

  I entered the work for a literary competition. Soon after that the telephone rang and a pleasant voice informed me that I had won an award. I attended the ceremony. In addition to a substantial sum of money I was presented with a silver pen, or rather a silvery-looking pen. It was in all respects identical to the one given me by my husband. When I got home, I showed it to him and we laughed. It was indistinguishable from the one he had bought me.

  Except that the second pen wrote lies.

  It took me a while to discover this. Naturally, I assumed that it would make no difference whichever pen I used. But gradually I noticed that the prize pen wrote fluently and could always be relied on to produce something acceptable and polished but false. Whereas my gift pen either wrote feverishly and truthfully or it did not write at all. Once I had discovered this, I took care to keep the two pens apart, keeping the gift pen always about my person and the prize pen in its case in the bureau drawer.

  When the gift pen started to write incoherently, as it did with increasing frequency, I was tempted to rely more on the ever plausible prize pen. I found myself hovering around the desk which contained the pen like someone who has given up smoking but knows that there is still a pack of cigarettes in the drawer. After an immense effort, I finally resolved to use only the pen which my husband had given me. Despite its writing in fits and starts, its tendency to scribble gibberish, its refusals to write at all, I knew that somewhere within itself it contained the real stuff of writing. Even in fictional terms, it wrote the truth. I have used it ever since.

  The question is: With which pen am I writing this fable?

  The Sparkling Bitch

  It was precisely this sort of behaviour that made Charles Hay furious with his wife. He sat in the front seat next to the driver. His shirt, starched and clean that morning, had begun to wilt. They had pulled up at a small petrol station somewhere along the open dusty road from Ibadan to Lagos for her to use the lavatory. He waited impatiently. There was too much blank sky in this country for his liking. Too much heat and too much oppressive emptiness. He had been glad to leave behind the large tracts of land and the few devastated villages which his own company had left stinking of oil spillages. The mess offended him. Having ordered a cursory clean-up, necessitated by embarrassing but manageable international protest, his business was completed. Now he just wanted to return home to London. Usually his wife did not accompany him on these trips. She spent most of her time in England in their small Sussex cottage. There was no doubt that she was being deliberately perverse, as usual. He tried resting his elbow on the silvered frame of the open car window but the sun had made it too hot to bear.

  ‘Susan, come on,’ he called out through the car window towards the petrol pump. The hot air swallowed his words. His watch said ten-past twelve. They had two
and a half hours to reach Lagos Airport. Enough time, but all the same … he was a meticulous man.

  Susan Hay, wearing a short-sleeved cotton blouse and tailored stone-coloured shorts, was crouched, motionless, beside the single petrol stand. Near her, leaning against the pump, was a boy of about thirteen. He was clearly the victim of starvation: his thin black limbs were crossed and sharply folded like those of a spider playing dead.

  He had been hidden from sight by the petrol pump when she went in, but a glimpse of him startled her when she came back out from the toilets. She had not initially recognised that it was a person. The angularity of the black body outlined against the pale concrete forecourt and the faded red gasoline pump made her freeze with shock when she realised. Despite skeletal thinness, the boy’s figure resonated with a sort of violent power. The sharp angles made by his arms and legs reminded her of a runic letter she had once seen carved in stone. Susan Hay squatted down and pulled a US fifty-dollar note from her purse. She offered it to him but he did not move, so she placed it in the bowl at his side and swivelled on her heels looking round for a stone or something to stop it blowing away in the warm gritty breeze. Not finding anything, she fished in her bag once more and put some coins on top of the dollar bill to anchor it down. Then, for some reason, she settled on her haunches and just stayed there in the heat next to the boy.

  She had been squatting like that for about five minutes when her husband shouted out to her from the car. An irrational empathy kept her there. Her husband’s voice sounded distant. Understanding that she needed some response from the figure at her side in order to be released from this spell, she frowned to herself without changing her posture. It was not gratitude that she needed exactly. She was not sure what it was. Perhaps just an acknowledgement of her existence.