Black Bird

by Michel Basilieres

  “Of course.”

  “Therefore your cheque is small.”

  “I expected no less of you.”

  “Honestly, if you insist on being so unpleasant, I shan’t stay.”

  “Just leave the cheque.”

  Woland handed it over and turned to leave. Just as he reached the end of the corridor, he heard Jean-Baptiste say, “You could have made it large enough to cover my bail.”

  When the iron door at the end of the passageway banged shut and the bolt shot into place, Jean-Baptiste listened to the steely echo die out and then turned his attention back to the cheque in his hands. He was right: it was too small to buy his release. But it was still more money than he’d ever had at once. Was it possible Father or Grandfather could help him out, top up this cheque and set him free?

  He sat back down on his hard bunk, looked around at the concrete walls, the cracked floor, the open and stained toilet in the corner. He stood on the bunk and tried to look out the tiny window, but even on tiptoes he couldn’t see over the ledge.

  After a few days he’d calmed somewhat. He knew his way around a little more—whom to avoid, where not to walk, what not to say. He remained in his cell as much as possible. He asked for books, for paper.

  And he kept looking at that cheque. If he could sit out his sentence, he would still have it when he got out.

  Unexpectedly, Jean-Baptiste received a visit from Grandfather. In the first place he’d no reason to think Grandfather might have any sympathy for him, after the play; and in the second, he’d never had any reason to expect anything at all from him. Yet Grandfather was the first of his family to come visiting.

  “Your mother would have come,” he said, “but she’s still asleep.”

  Jean-Baptiste nodded. “But Father won’t come.”

  “He’s a little disappointed in you.”

  “I’m not a felquiste.”

  “I believe you. But someone in the family is.”

  “I know.”

  Grandfather said, “I’ve never been arrested, you know.”

  “Funny, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, funny. Lately a lot of things have been funny.”

  “How do you mean?”

  Grandfather struggled for a moment to put his thoughts in order. He hadn’t realized that he had any to arrange, and so the surprise that he was about to explain something, as much to himself as to Jean-Baptiste, was like cold water on his face. Jean-Baptiste was startled by the look that came over him; he tilted his head up slightly, as if he were reading words off the ceiling, and the muscles around his eyes twitched as if he were asleep. He held his hands together in his lap with his fingers outstretched and leaned his back against the cold cement wall. It occurred to Jean-Baptiste that Grandfather looked more at home in this cell than he; in fact, in his cheap, ragged clothes and wrinkled skin, he looked like an early martyr accepting his fate. It was no longer possible to tell which eye was glass. At last he began to speak.

  “You’re still at the beginning of your life, and this is only your first lesson. At the beginning of my life I learned hard lessons about the reality of things and the appearance of things. In the orphanage I was shown, by people who said they were concerned with my well-being and my welfare, that the charity of others is a prison. A kind of slavery.

  “I learned that the robes of a priest are the costumes of the world’s greatest sinners. I was taught that in my bunk in the dark, before I was taught to read the Bible. The priests taught me to read the Bible so that I might learn to turn the other cheek; they wanted me to learn that to forgive those who trespass against you is holy, but it was they who were the trespassers. They wanted me to learn that my spiritual health was more important than my material well-being and that God and heaven existed and were waiting for me. But instead they taught me their keen interest in my body, and by their betrayal of their own beliefs demonstrated the empty and cold nature of the world.

  “When I was old enough to work and fend for myself I learned that those who spoke of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work were making their own livelihood off my back, and that whatever they paid me, they collected double on. When I was occasionally able to make a profit off others, I learned that the goods I acquired suddenly needed protection for their own sake, that it wasn’t enough to have acquired them, I must maintain them at an even greater cost. I learned that even owning things was a form of slavery and a prison.

  “When I became old enough to vote I was told that I held the power of self-determination in my hand and that democracy would set me free. After I’d cast my vote, I saw that all lawyers were liars, that freely elected governments were not loath to send in the army and that democracy itself was just a slave of capitalism.

  “When I was old enough to marry I was told that love is what makes us human, different from the animals, that love was the supreme expression of the union of two souls. But after I was first wed I discovered the trap a marriage could be, the endless lifelong series of obligations and compromises that keep us from being ourselves for ourselves. I was told that children were our way to immortality, but I learned that their disappointments and resentments were a sure road to the death of my soul.

  “Above all I learned that what the world calls happiness and wishes upon us is oppressive and self-serving, that the world cares not for individuals but only for the propagation of the masses, and never questions itself in this regard, and punishes all who question it. This is one thing you’ve learned today.

  “So I settled into a life of small expectations, no ambition and a deep satisfaction in small, simple and immediate pleasures—which have always seemed to me the only ones worth having, as they’re the only ones we can be sure of, which have no hidden motive behind them. Intentionally I would make myself happy any way I could, any way that cost not too much effort or money, any way that didn’t involve a sacrifice.

  “This didn’t mean that I couldn’t make others happy at the same time, or that I never wanted to make others happy. It’s just that that was never my habit. Making someone else content was for me like a change in the weather or a new kind of food. It was just the variety, the spice, that made my own routine my preferred way of doing things.

  “So there were times when I brought my wife gifts or flowers, or took her to dinner, because her happiness for that moment was a pleasure to me, if only because it was a relief from her usual misery. Or there were times, like now, when I bothered to talk to my children or grandchildren, to tell them stories or listen to their chatter, or offer such advice as I could.

  “But in the main I wasn’t interested in other people’s troubles. I wasn’t interested in planning or saving for any future project. I wasn’t interested in moving to a better house or neighbourhood, or getting a divorce, or providing anything for my wife and children. I felt that everyone ought to provide for himself whatever he wanted as best he could. And since I wasn’t interested in possessing anything for any length of time, I was content if there were only enough to eat and a place to sleep. I was happy with a cheap cigar or cheap liquor, or even cheap women, now and again, whenever the mood would strike me.

  “The idea of expecting any of these pleasures, large or small, to be a regular part of my life, or a circumstance that I’d come to consider as normal, was repellent to me. I believed that a life of that sort could only be a weight on my shoulders. That was my idea of what others called the rat race, or the bourgeoisie: people trapped under the oppressiveness of their own lives, unable to escape from the burden of their material well-being. Or frightened in their hearts of some kind of a Judgment Day or moral censure if they should happen to work towards their own happiness at the expense of their responsibilities. I couldn’t see an ordinary life lived in an ordinary way as anything but one kind of social slavery or another. And the only friends I had were those who shared these opinions in some way, who were usually thought of as unsavoury. The unemployed, alcoholics, whores, thieves, pushers … doctors.

  �
��So my life went on and was full of things everyone experiences—money, poverty, sickness, health, divorce, marriage, death, birth. But also happiness, pleasure, surprise.

  “And then this thing happened to me, that I lost my left eye.

  “You’ll think me just drunk again, or addled with the painkillers, or senile. But since I’ve had this glass eye in I’ve begun to see things differently. Of course it sounds ridiculous that I should see anything through a glass eye, and I don’t know if I do or not. But I tell you that now things look different to me.

  “And I don’t simply mean that my attitude has changed. I mean I’ve seen things that I’ve never seen before. I’ve seen things that aren’t easily explained by a merely material universe. And I don’t mean that I’m seeing ghosts or spirits; though I’ve thought that occasionally, I’ve decided I was wrong. The world itself and everything in it is suddenly revealing to me what I can only call its moral dimension.

  “When I was a child, the Church successfully beat any spiritual sense out of me with its hostility and hypocrisy, with its devils dressed as angels. Nevertheless I’ve been living my life all along with an assumption of the spiritual value of things. I set that value at zero, for everything. Everything, that is, except my own momentary pleasure, which I gave a value slightly above zero, but only because it relieved my suffering.

  “But now I think that my suffering itself was a call, a sign that there must be some kind of value external to myself. And now I see that whatever that value is depends on how I see it. Because when I lost my left eye, I lost the ability to see things the way I wanted. I could no longer control what I saw.

  “Some days everything would be normal, as it ever had been. Other days I would wake up with a renewed sense of ease, of youth and contentment. I was positively disposed to the world, and was willing to give a little to make others happy, or I wanted to make others happy for their own sake for the first time. I began to see physical things differently. I began to see the connections between things. I don’t mean their causes and effects, but I could make out direct physical relations between objects, as if I could detect the forces of gravity that kept them in relation to one another. And I began to see things that I’d always thought impossible. I saw dead people get up and move unaided; I saw mannequins come to life, like Pinocchio. I saw myself inside my children. I see myself in you now.

  “And because of that I’m trying to explain this to you. If I’m in you in any way, I don’t want you to wait until the end of your life to understand what I see now.”

  Grandfather paused. He shifted slightly and cleared his throat, but kept his eyes away from Jean-Baptiste. He seemed almost embarrassed, as if he were forcing himself onward.

  “It’s become a comfort to me in my old age. I can move my patch over the eye I was born with and then with the new eye I can see everything in its best light, when I no longer want to see anything poor or evil. And then again, on bad days when on waking I open the wrong eye, I can close down the sentimental, optimistic organ and revel in the malicious and the tawdry. So if I go down to the cathouse on de Bullion street, with the proper eye I can see in the hookers what I saw in my dear wife, and I’m again consumed with love, love for the whole female gender. Or when the beast in me is rising and I want to debase myself with my inherited male cruelty, I can see them for the cheap whores they are, over-painted, tired, by turns lascivious and inhuman.

  “Which eye is which? I ask myself that every morning before I dare open either.

  “But then one day, for the first time, I looked at myself in the mirror while I was wearing the patch, and the part of me that hates the other looked upon the part of me that pities itself. Or perhaps it was the other way around; it’s impossible to say. For the first time I was conscious of both my optimism and my desperation as if they were separate beings regarding one another. I felt both the weight of meaninglessness and the lightness of play, which had always competed in me to dominate my emotions, but which I was only able to experience in their pure states with the help of the patch. Except that this time, at that moment I stared at myself in the mirror, I was not only fully who I am but each separate part of me regarding myself. As if I were regarding my own twin sons, or an earlier me, with both nostalgia and scorn.

  “I see that things which seem opposed are not. I see that things which seem in union are not. I feel like the image of a man with the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, urging me one way or the other. I feel like the devil’s been missing for most of my life, and I’ve been carrying this little angel around with me. I know anyone who knows me must think it’s absurd for me to say that, that I meant to say devil instead of angel. But I’ve said what I think is the truth. Even if it makes little sense.

  “What I’ve learned is that these opposites have no meaning. Thinking of them as the reverse of one another has no meaning. Believing I’ve come to some spiritual awakening has no meaning. I don’t believe I’ve discovered any kind of a truth, because that kind of a truth would be too simple and a lie. But I no longer believe it’s even possible to lie about anything.

  “What I’m saying isn’t absurd, or paradoxical, even if I don’t quite understand it myself. For the first time in my life I’ve been giving long thought to puzzling questions, and I can only say that I’m trying to live with my experience even when I know it must be faulty. Yet I continue to experience it as reality.

  “And I don’t expect that my saying this can do anyone any good. But it’s made me feel better to tell someone.”

  When his grandfather left him to his cell, Jean-Baptiste thought about this strange confession. How it revealed a man living unsuspected beneath the grave-robbing reprobate, how the simplest of lives was no shield from the mysteries of Being, and how time itself reshapes our experience so that, at the end of our lives, their beginnings appear entirely different than when we lived through them. He took a pen and scrounged together some napkins, and in the time-honoured tradition of writers in prisons, began to write.

  Prison was a place Marie had avoided as best she could. She’d known enough felquistes who’d spent time inside, even some who still were. It was common wisdom among them not to visit friends in jail. Signing the guest book was registering yourself with the police as a fellow-traveller. But this time it was different. She could hardly refuse to visit her brother. It was an awkward family obligation for everyone, since they were all angry over the play. But Marie couldn’t help feeling guilty for his plight. So when they pushed her, she went.

  It was always difficult between them. They knew each other so little, all they knew were their differences. Marie, nervous and claustrophobic in prison, fell back on sarcasm, the only opening she could find. “I hear you were arrested for reading poetry.”

  Jean-Baptiste wasn’t happy to see her in the first place, and her opening words were irritating. “I was arrested because you planted illiterate propaganda in my boxes. It’s your fault I’m here.”

  She tried to steer the conversation into banter. “It’s true I wasn’t there, but I’m sure if I’d been subjected to your verse, I would have called the cops too.”

  “I can’t believe you. You’re actually mad at me, aren’t you? What the hell for?”

  Marie was lost. Everything she said made him furious. She didn’t know how to answer. “You’re stealing the show. You’re making us look like fools.”

  “Excuse me, but I’m the one in jail, here. None of this has worked out for me at all.”

  Marie sighed angrily. She had nothing left but a bitter defensiveness. “Sorry to disrupt your bourgeois ambitions.”

  “Ambitions nothing. That play wasn’t what I wanted onstage. I got precious little of my own work up there. But I’m blamed for everything. The family hates me, but they don’t understand how little control I had over the play.”

  “It’s a little too late to start pleading innocence, Jean-Baptiste.”

  “For Christ’s sake, no one even heard any of the poetry I was re
ading. Now I’m stuck in here, people think I actually wrote that trash of a play, and my family hates me.”

  “Stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”

  “Why are you mad at me? What do you want from me?”

  Marie found herself yelling. “You never helped me. You never did anything for me or my friends. You won’t help your own people. You refused to write for us, to join us, to help us or support us in any way.”

  “I never helped you? My family thinks I was fucking my sister the night Angus died, but I never helped you? Fuck you.”

  Marie was stung. She turned from him as her eyes welled up.

  “Why the hell should I help?” Jean-Baptiste rushed on. “I don’t agree with you. I’m not interested in politics. Politics is full of hypocrites. It’s either Thieves for Democracy or Fascists for a Fundamentalist Dictatorship. I hate to think which you are.”

  They were silent a moment, looking away from each other.

  “I expected more from you.” Marie wiped her eyes. “You’re smart, but you’re wasting yourself on scribblings that do no one any good.” She stood to leave.

  “Well, I’m sure I won’t be doing much more scribbling.” Jean-Baptiste waved a hand in the air, like Woland. “My reputation will precede me now. I’ll never live this down.”

  “I brought you some chocolate.” She put a candy bar on the table.

  He sighed. Quietly, he asked, “Have you got any paper?”

  When Hubert disappeared Marie thought taking over as de facto leader was simply picking up another chore he’d left undone, like the dishes or the house-cleaning. But when she’d actually organized and implemented the pamphleteering campaign, she realized two things:

  The others had accepted her leadership.

  It felt good.

  For once, her ideas had not been dismissed or trivialized. For once, she’d found herself directing the actions of others, and they’d seen the results in the newspapers. The whole town was abuzz with their actions.