Dany Klotz | NO is a complete sentence
Once upon a time the little strip of land across from the Towers belonged to the birds, who scavenged in the creek bed and cracked open pine cones for the kernels. Now it has become a green space, a public park for two-legged animals: the creek has been straightened, concreted over, and absorbed into the runoff network.
From these new arrivals the bird keep a cautious distance. All save the magpies. All save the magpie-in-chief (that i show I think of him), the oldest – at least the stateliest and most battered looking. He (that is how I think of him, male to the core) walks in slow circles around me where I sit. He is not inspecting me. He is not curious about me. He is warning me, warning me off. He is also looking for my vulnerable point, in case he needs to attack, in case it comes down to that.
At the end of the road (this is how I conceive it) he is prepared to entertain the possibility of a compromise: a compromise, for example, in which I beat a retreat into one of the protective cages that we human animals have erected on the far side of the street, while he retains this space as his own; or a compromise in which I agree to come out of my cage only during specified hours, between three and five in the afternoon, say, when he likes to take a snooze.
One morning there was a sudden imperious clatter at my kitchen window. There he was, clinging to the ledge with his claws, slapping his wings, glaring in, serving me with a warning: even indoors I might not be safe.
Now, in the late spring, he and his wives sing to each other all night in the treetops. They could not careless that they keep me awake.
The magpie-in-chief has no firm idea of how long human beings live, but he thinks it is not as long as magpies. He thinks I will die in that cage of mine, die of old age. Then he can better the window down, strut in, and peck out my eyes.
Every now and again, when the weather is hot, he deigns to drink from the bowl of the drinking fountain. In the moment when he raises his beak to allow the water to run down his gullet, he makes himself vulnerable to attack, and he is aware of that. So he is careful to maintain a particularly severe mien. Just dare laugh, he says, and I will come after you.
I never waver from according him the full respect, the full attention he demands. This morning he caught a beetle and was very proud of himself –chuffed with himself, as the English say. With the beetle helpless in his beak, its wings broken and splayed on either side, he hopped toward me, pausing at length with each hop, until he was no more than a metre removed. “Well done,” I murmured to him. He cocked his head to listen to my brief, two syllable song. Was he acknowledging me, I asked myself? Do I come here often enough to count, in his eyes, as part of his establishment?
There are visits from the cockatoos as well. One sits peaceably in a wild plum tree. He regards me, holds out a plum kernel in his claw as if to say, “would you like a bite?” I want to say, “this is a public garden. You are as much visitor as I, it is not up to you to offer me food. “But public, private, it is no more than a puff of air to him. “It’s a free world, ” he says.
On the birds of the air” | J.M. Coetzee | Diary of a Bad Year | pp. 161-163 | Vintage, London | 2007
