Gyorgy Dragoman - The White King

Hearing that made me turn all red and I was just about to spill the water, but then I said, "Yes, I remember really well." Pickax said he was sorry about it, it was a nasty prank, folks shouldn't go joking about life and death. He asked how long it had been since I'd seen my father. I said it would be more than a year and a half pretty soon and that we hadn't gotten any news about him in a really long time and that I was worried that my mother was starting to believe he died, but I knew he was alive, I could feel it in my bones, and I knew I'd feel it right away if anything happened to him. Pickax meanwhile came over to my side of the hut and went on pouring the water. He said he hoped I was right, but I should bear in mind that feelings don't always show the truth, no, lots of times they show only what someone wants to feel, but I didn't say anything to that as I stood there with that broken-necked bottle still in my hand, staring at a finch in a nook closed off by pantyhose stretched out over the head of a badminton racket, the birdie was scratching its spiny little feet against a twig stuck in the wall, and its leg was all green and really, really thin. Pickax took the glass jar out of my hand and said now that they'd gotten their water we should go sit down because as long as we were standing so close to their nooks, they sure wouldn't drink, and if there was no drinking there wouldn't be any singing either, and he would really like for me to hear what a concert they could give, so it would be best if we went and sat down there at the table. Nodding his head toward the three-legged kitchen table, he went over, pulled a stool out from under it for me to sit on, and waited until I took my place before sitting down across from me.

After rummaging about a little in the table's drawer, Pickax took out a spool of thread, pulled a long sewing needle from his jacket collar, and told me to give him my jacket, so we could do something useful in the meantime. He broke off a length of thread with his teeth, passed it through the eye of the needle, and began sewing up my jacket with nimble little stitches. From the way the skin on his face stretched tight, it was obvious he was concentrating really hard, the pockmarks looked deeper, and his thick, milk-blond eyebrows twitched as he leaned really close to the jacket, his hand working rapidly, and it was so quiet that I could hear the swishing of the thread between his fingers, as if the birds, which I couldn't hear at all, weren't even there. When I then asked Pickax where he'd learned to sew this well, all he said was that a long time ago he'd been training to become a taxidermist. "But better to forget about that, yes," he sighed, "that was a different life," and Pickax looked up at me, bit his lips, and asked me to tell him about my dad. My belly knotted up and I knew I should say, "No, I won't say a thing, it's none of your business," but then somehow this old memory hit me from when I was in nursery school, and I started telling Pickax about how back then my father hardly ever came to get me after school, he was so busy that I usually saw him only at night, but one winter afternoon for some reason he did come get me, he wanted to help me tie my shoes even though I'd been tying them by myself for years. I was big already, just six months away from starting school, so I didn't even want to hold his hand, but the fog was thicker than I'd ever seen, cottony thick and white as snow, my father said it was like sour cream, you could see hardly two feet ahead, even the yellow headlights of cars got lost in that fog, which sucked up light like a sponge, I remembered looking down and barely seeing even my own legs. Anyway, then my father took my hand just so we wouldn't lose each other, and he began telling me about Roald Amundsen, the famous Norwegian polar explorer, about how Amundsen once crossed all of Greenland on skis, except that by the end he got so lost in the fog that he didn't find his destination, his friend's hut, and figuring that his compass was shot, he turned around and with superhuman strength he struggled his way back to where he began, and a couple of months later he got a letter from his friend, and in it, his friend told him he found ski tracks on that day two yards from his hut, yes, that's how deceptive and dangerous fog can be. Back then my father's voice was all raspy from night work and cigarettes, but the fog really softened it up, it hardly seemed to be my father's voice at all, and I held his hand as we walked along, and I was thinking we were lost for sure, just like Amundsen, that we'd long passed by our apartment block and were on the far side of town by now, only that my father didn't dare admit it, he didn't want to be ashamed in front of me, but I felt as if we'd been going for a long time already, and my father was still telling me about Amundsen, about how he found the Northwest Passage, but by then it was obvious from his voice that he was nervous, and then, right when I was sure that we were lost forever, suddenly I tripped on something, and I looked down and saw that it was the step leading up to the entrance to our building, and I was so relieved and happy that I cried out, "Wow, we got home, we really got home!" and it was like my father didn't even notice how happy and relieved I was, no, he just went on telling me about how Amundsen's boat, the Gjoa, met up with a San Francisco whaling ship in the Bering Strait after three years, and how happy they were to have found the Northwest Passage, to succeed in accomplishing a mission that so many before them had undertaken in vain, that so many courageous polar explorers had paid for with their lives, and even though the Northwest Passage didn't fulfill the hopes people had for it from a commercial point of view, its discovery was really important all the same. And as we went up the stairs I realized that my father knew full well I'd been thinking we were lost, but because he didn't want me to feel ashamed about it afterward, he didn't want to be obvious about having noticed it. When I realized this, I got so ashamed that by the time we reached the fifth floor I was almost crying, that's how sorry I was about doubting my father even for a moment. That story hadn't popped into my mind since then, even though I once had to answer quiz questions out loud in class about Amundsen, but not even then did I remember the story, no, it was like I didn't want to remember at all that I might ever have doubted my father. Anyway, after telling Pickax about this I fell silent and shook my head and looked at him, and I said that I didn't even know why I'd thought of this story just now, and I especially didn't understand why I was telling a complete stranger, but Pickax told me not to be sorry, it was a really nice story, and then he gave back my jacket and told me to just try finding even a trace of a rip on it. After putting the thread back in the drawer he raised a finger and whispered, "Listen up, now, quietly, quietly," and he himself began listening so attentively that he didn't even take a single breath, so I also held back my breathing, and it got completely quiet around us, and then all of a sudden a titmouse started twittering, and from the opposite wall another one answered, and then a third bird called out, I couldn't tell what kind it was, but by then a fourth was singing, and a fifth, and then all of them, but not at the same time, and not helter-skelter either, like when we came in, but according to some really complicated order, as if one great big song had formed from all those little ones, it was like a real concert only a lot louder, and there we sat, Pickax and I, right in the middle of it. It lasted for a few minutes, maybe even fifteen, and meanwhile Pickax shut his eyes and just sat there listening, smiling all the time and swaying back and forth in his chair, and my legs began moving and a couple of times I too rocked in my chair as the air around us became completely saturated with a strange, vibrating birdsong, as if we were sitting in steam or thick warm fog, and my head was on the verge of throbbing again. But then the birds must have gotten tired because their singing started slowly unraveling, and once more you could hear this bird or that bird apart from the crowd.