Саманта Швеблин: Mouthful of Birds

I brought Sara home. She didn’t say anything on the way, and when we got there, she unloaded her things by herself. Her birdcage, her suitcase—which she and her mother had loaded into the trunk—and four shoe boxes like the one Silvia had brought from the garage. I couldn’t bring myself to help her. I opened the front door, and I waited there while she came and went with everything. After I’d told her she could use the upstairs bedroom and waited a few minutes while she settled in, I had her come down and sit across from me at the dining table. I fixed two cups of coffee. Sara pushed hers to the side and said she didn’t drink anything brewed.

“You eat birds, Sara.”

“Yes, Dad.”

She bit her lips, ashamed, and said:

“You do, too.”

“You eat live birds, Sara.”

“Yes, Dad.”

I remembered Sara at five years old, sitting at the table with us and fanatically devouring a squash, and I thought we would find the way to resolve this problem. But when the Sara I had in front of me smiled again, I wondered what it would be like to have a mouth full of something all feathers and feet, to swallow something warm and moving. I covered my mouth with my hand the way Silvia had done earlier, and I left Sara alone before the two untouched cups of coffee.

Three days passed. Sara spent almost all that time in the living room, upright on the sofa with her legs pressed together and her hands on her knees. I left early for work and endured the hours searching the internet for infinite combinations of words like bird , raw , cure , adoption , knowing that she was still sitting there, looking out at the yard for hours on end. When I came back to the house around seven and saw her just as I’d pictured her throughout the day, the hair stood up on the back of my neck and I felt like leaving and locking her in, hermetically sealed, like those insects I’d hunted when I was little and kept in glass jars until the air ran out. Could I do it?

When I was little I went to a circus once, and I saw a bearded woman who put live rats in her mouth. She held one there for a while, its tail wriggling between her closed lips while she paraded before the audience, smiling, her eyes turned upward as if it gave her some great pleasure. Now I thought about that woman almost every night as I tossed and turned, unable to sleep, mulling over the possibility of checking Sara into a psychiatric hospital. Maybe I could visit her once or twice a week. Silvia and I could take turns. I thought about those cases when the doctors recommend the patient be isolated, keeping him away from family for a few months. Maybe it would be a good option for everyone, but I wasn’t sure Sara could survive in a place like that. Or could she? In any case, her mother wouldn’t allow it. Or would she? I couldn’t decide.

On the fourth day Silvia came to see us. She brought five shoe boxes that she left just inside the front door. Neither of us said a word about them. She asked where Sara was, and I pointed her to the bedroom upstairs. Later, she came back down alone. I offered her coffee. We drank it in the living room, in silence. She was pale, and at times her hands shook and made the cup rattle in the saucer. We both knew what the other was thinking. I could have said, This is your fault, this is what you’ve brought us to, and she could have said something absurd like This is happening because you never paid attention to her . But the truth is, we were both very tired.

“I’ll take care of that,” said Silvia before she left, pointing to the shoe boxes she’d brought. I didn’t say anything, but I was deeply grateful.

In the supermarket, people loaded their carts up with cereal boxes, sweets, vegetables, and dairy products. I stuck with my canned foods and waited quietly in the checkout line. I went to the supermarket two or three times a week. Sometimes, even if I had nothing to buy, I still stopped there on my way home. I took a cart and walked through the aisles thinking about what I could be forgetting. At night, we watched TV together. Sara sat upright in her corner of the couch, and I sat at the other end, sneaking a look at her every once in a while to see if she was following the show or had her eyes glued on the yard again. I fixed food for us both and brought it to the living room on two trays. I put Sara’s down in front of her, and that’s where it stayed. She waited for me to start eating and then said:

“Excuse me, Dad.”

And she’d stand up, go to her room, and gently close the door. The first time, I turned down the TV and waited in silence. There was a brief, sharp shriek. A few seconds later, I heard the pipes in the bathroom, the water running. Sometimes she came down after a little while, serene, her hair perfectly combed. Other times she showered and came down in pajamas.

Sara didn’t want to go out. Studying her behavior, I thought maybe she was suffering from the beginnings of agoraphobia. Sometimes I took a chair out to the yard and tried to convince her to come outside for a while. But it was no use. Even so, her complexion continued to radiate energy, and she looked more and more beautiful, as if she spent her days exercising in the sun.

Every once in a while, as I went about my business, I found a feather. On the floor beside the door, behind the coffee can, among the silverware, or in the bathroom sink, still wet. I would pick it up, taking care that she didn’t see me do it, and flush it down the toilet. Sometimes I stood watching the water carry it down. Sometimes the toilet filled up again, the water grew calm and mirrorlike once more, and I was still there looking, wondering if it was necessary to go back to the supermarket, if it was really worth it to fill the carts with so much garbage, and thinking about Sara, about what could be out there in the yard.

One afternoon, Silvia called to let me know she was in bed with a vicious flu. She said she couldn’t come visit us. She asked if I could manage without her. I asked if she had a fever, if she was eating enough, if she’d been to the doctor, and when I had her busy enough with her answers, I told her I had to hang up, and I did. The phone rang again, but I didn’t answer.

We watched TV. When I brought my food, Sara didn’t get up to go to her room. She concentrated on the yard until I finished eating, then she looked back at the TV show.

The next day, I stopped at the supermarket before going home. I put a few things in my cart, the same ones as always. I wandered the aisles as if I were doing a first reconnaissance of the store. I stopped at the pet section, where there was food for dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, and fish. I picked up some of the items and examined them more closely. I read their ingredients, how many calories they provided, and the amounts recommended for each breed, weight, and age. Then I went to the gardening section, where there were only plants with and without flowers, and flowerpots and dirt, so I went back to the pet section and stood there thinking about what to do next. Other shoppers filled their carts and steered them around me. The loudspeaker announced a sale on dairy products in honor of Mother’s Day, and then played a song about a guy who had all kinds of women but who longed for his first love, until finally I pushed the cart back to the canned-goods section.

That night it took Sara a while to fall asleep. My room was below hers and I could hear her pace nervously above me, get into bed, and then get out again. I wondered what condition the room was in; I hadn’t gone up since she’d arrived. Maybe the place was a real disaster, a barnyard full of muck and feathers.