Michael Chabon: The Final Solution

‘Now, I’m warning you well beforehand, this time, Master Steinman,’ she said as she ladled pale green cream, flecked with emerald, into the boy’s bowl, ‘it’s a cold soup and meant to be.’ She looked at Mr Shane, frowning, though her eyes held a faint glint of amusement. ‘Sprayed the whole table with cream soup, last week, did the boy, Mr Shane,’ she went on. ‘Ruined Reggie’s best cravat.’

‘If only that were the most this boy had ruined,’ Reggie said, from behind his spoonful of cucumber soup. ‘If only we could leave it at a cravat.’

Reggie Panicker was the despair of the Panickers and, like many sons who betray even the most modest aspirations of their parents, a scourge of the neighbourhood as well. He was a gambler, a liar, a malcontent, and a sneak. Parkins – showing, it now seemed to him, a certain thickness of wit – had lost a pair of gold cufflinks, a box of pen nibs, twelve shillings, and his good luck charm, a blond five-franc chip from the Casino Royale in Monaco, before catching on to Reggie’s thieving ways.

‘And how old would young Mr Steinman be, then?’ Mr Shane said, training the flashing heliograph of his smile on the faraway eyes of the little Jew. ‘Nine is it? Are you nine, boy?’

As usual, though, the lookouts in the head of Linus Steinman had been left unmanned. The smile went unacknowledged. The boy seemed, in fact, not to have heard the question, though Parkins had long since established that there was nothing wrong with his ears. The sudden clatter of a plate could make him jump. The tolling of the bell in the church tower could fill his great dark eyes with unaccountable tears.

‘You won’t get answers out of that one,’ Reggie said, tipping the last of his soup into his mouth. ‘Dumb as a mallet, is that one.’

The boy looked down at his soup. He frowned. He was regarded by most of the residents of the vicarage, and in the neighbourhood, as non-Anglophonic and quite possibly stupid. But Parkins had his doubts on both scores.

‘Master Steinman came to us from Germany,’ Mr Panicker said. He was a learned man whose Oxford accent was tinged with a disappointed subcontinental lilt. ‘He formed part of a small group of children, most of them Jewish, whose emigration to Britain was negotiated by Mr Wilkes, the vicar of the English Church in Berlin.’

Shane nodded, mouth open, eyes blinking slowly, like a golfing man pretending to enjoy for courtesy’s sake an impromptu lecture on cell mitosis or irrational numbers. He might never have heard of Germany or Jews or, for that matter, of vicars or children. The air of deep boredom that settled over his features looked entirely natural to them. And yet Mr Parkins mistrusted it. The parrot, whose name was Bruno, was now reciting from Der Erlkönig, softly, even one might have said politely, in its high, halting voice. The bird’s delivery, though toneless and a bit rushed, had a childish poignancy not inappropriate to the subject of the poem. And yet still the new lodger had taken no notice of the parrot.

Mr Shane looked at the boy, who looked down at his soup, dipping the merest tip of his spoon into the thick pale bowlful. As far as Parkins had ever observed – and he was a careful and pointed observer – the boy ate with relish only sweets and puddings.

‘Nazis, was it?’ said Shane. He gave his head a moderate shake. ‘Rotten business. Tough luck for the Jews, when you come right down to it.’ The question of whether or not the boy was going to spit out the bit of soup he had dabbed onto his tongue appeared to interest him far more than had the internment of the Jews. The boy frowned, and knit his thick eyebrows together. But the soup remained safely in his mouth, and at last Mr Shane turned his attention to polishing off his own portion. Parkins wondered if the dull and unpleasant subject were now to be dropped.

‘No place for a child, to be sure,’ said Shane. ‘A camp of that sort. Nor, I imagine –’ He laid down his spoon and raised his eyes, with a swiftness that startled Mr Parkins, to the corner of the room where, on top of a heavy iron pole, on a scarred wooden crosspiece, with pages of yesterday’s Express spread underneath, Bruno the parrot gazed critically back at him. ‘– for a parrot.’

Ah, thought Mr Parkins.

‘I suppose you think a wretched stone hovel in the dullest corner of Sussex is a fine place for an African bird, then,’ Reggie Panicker said.

Mr Shane blinked.

‘Please excuse my son’s rudeness,’ Mr Panicker said, with a sigh, laying down his own spoon though his bowl was only half empty. If there had been a time when he reprimanded the steady churlishness of his only child, it predated Mr Parkins’s tenure in the house. ‘We have all grown very fond of young Linus and his pet, as it happens. And really, Bruno is a most remarkable animal. He recites poetry, as you hear now. He sings songs. He is a most gifted mimic and has already startled my wife a number of times by counterfeiting my own, perhaps overly vehement, manner of sneezing.’

‘Really?’ Mr Shane said. ‘Well, Mr Panicker, I hope you won’t mind my saying that between your roses and this young chap with his parrot, I seem to have landed myself in a very interesting household.’

He was watching the bird, head cocked to one side in a way that echoed, no doubt unconsciously, the angle from which Bruno habitually preferred to view the world.

‘Sings does he?’

‘That’s right. Principally in German, though from time to time one hears snatches of Gilbert & Sullivan. Chiefly bits of Iolanthe, as far as I can tell. Quite startling the first few times.’

‘But is it all rote – parroting, as it were?’ Mr Shane smiled thinly, as if to imply, insincerely Mr Parkins thought, that he knew his little joke was not amusing. ‘Or is he capable of actual thought, would you say? I once saw a pig, as a boy, a performing pig, that could find the square root of three-digit numbers.’

His gaze, as he said this, flashed briefly and for the first time toward Parkins. This, though it seemed to confirm Mr Parkins’s hunch about the new lodger, also troubled him. As far as anyone in the neighbourhood knew, there was no reason to connect him with the subject of digits and numbers. The suspicion that Mr Shane had been sent by Certain People to observe Bruno firsthand, Mr Parkins now considered to have been confirmed.

‘Numbers,’ Mr Panicker said. ‘Oddly enough, Bruno seems quite fond of them, doesn’t he, Mr Parkins? Always rattling off great chains and lists of them. All in German, naturally. Though I can’t say that he appears to do anything with them that I’m aware of.’

‘No? He keeps me from sleeping,’ Reggie said. ‘That’s use enough for me. That’s startling enough for me, all right.’

At this point Mrs Panicker swept back into the dining room carrying the fish course on a pale green platter. For reasons that had never been articulated to Mr Parkins but which he felt must have a good deal to do with her otherwise unexpressed feelings about her husband and son, she never joined them for dinner. She cleared away the bowls as Mr Parkins muttered his approval of the soup. There was something desperate and brave about the landlady’s good cookery. It was like the quavering voice of a bagpipe, issuing forth from a citadel that was invested on all sides by dervishes and infidels on the morning of the day on which it would finally be sacked.

‘Excellent soup!’ barked Mr Shane. ‘Compliments to the chef!’

Mrs Panicker flushed deeply, and a smile unlike any that Parkins had ever seen there, tiny and pouting, made a brief appearance on her lips.

Mr Panicker noticed it too, and frowned.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘Phew!’ said the younger Panicker, fanning away the steam that rose from the platter on which lay a plaice that retained its head and tail. ‘That fish is off, Mother. It smells like the underside of Brighton Pier.’