The Final Solution. Michael Chabon
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Flower discarded, valuables restored with a zip to their lodging, the boy stood motionless. He held out to the old man a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a beggar’s tin cup. The old man could hear the flatted chiming of milk cans at Satterlee’s farm a quarter mile off, the agitated rustle of the housemartins under his own eaves, and, as always, the ceaseless machination of the hives. The boy shifted from one foot to the other, as if searching for an appropriate response. He opened his mouth, and closed it again. It was the parrot who finally spoke.
‘Zwei eins sieben fünf vier sieben drei,’ the parrot said, in a soft, oddly breathy voice, with the slightest hint of a lisp. The boy stood, as if listening to the parrot’s statement, though his expression did not deepen or complicate. ‘Vier acht vier neun eins eins sieben.’
The old man blinked. The German numbers were so unexpected, literally so outlandish, that for a moment they registered only as a series of uncanny noises, savage avian utterances devoid of any sense.
‘Bist du deutscher?’ the old man finally managed, a little uncertain, for a moment, of whether he was addressing the boy or the parrot. It had been thirty years since he had last spoken German, and he felt the words tumble from a high back shelf of his mind.
Cautiously, with a first flicker of emotion in his gaze, the boy nodded.
The old man stuck his injured finger into his mouth and sucked it without quite realizing that he did so, without remarking the salt flavour of his own blood. To encounter a solitary German, on the South Downs, in July 1944, and a German boy at that – here was a puzzle to kindle old appetites and energies. He felt pleased with himself for having roused his bent frame from the insidious grip of his armchair.
‘How did you get here?’ the old man said. ‘Where are you going? Where in heaven’s name did you get that parrot?’ Then he offered translations into German, of varying quality, for each of his questions.
The boy stood, faintly smiling as he scratched at the back of the parrot’s head with two grimy fingers. The density of his silence suggested something more than unwillingness to speak; the old man wondered if the boy might be rather less German than mentally defective, incapable of sound or sense. An idea came to the old man. He held up a hand to the boy, signaling that he ought to wait just where he was. Then he withdrew once more to the gloom of his cottage. In a corner cabinet, behind a battered coal scuttle in which he had once kept his pipes, he found a dust-furred tin of violet pastilles, stamped with the portrait of a British general whose great victory had long since lost any relevance to the present situation of the Empire. The old man’s retinae swam with blots and paisley tadpoles of remembered summer light, and the luminous inverted ghost of a boy with a parrot on his shoulder. He had a sudden understanding of himself, from the boy’s point of view, as a kind of irascible ogre, appearing from the darkness of his thatched cottage like something out of the Brothers Grimm, with a rusted tin of suspect sweets in his clawlike, bony hand. He was surprised, and relieved as well, to find the boy still standing there when he reemerged.
‘Here,’ he said, holding out the tin. ‘It has been many years, but in my time sweets were widely acknowledged to be a kind of juvenile Esperanto.’ He grinned, doubtless a crooked and ogreish grin. ‘Come. Have a pastille? There. Good lad.’
The boy nodded, and crossed the sandy dooryard to take the confectionery from the tin. He helped himself to three or four of the little pilules, then gave a solemn nod of thanks. A mute, then; something wrong with his vocal apparatus.
‘Bitte,’ said the old man. For the first time in a very many years, he felt the old vexation, the mingled impatience and pleasure at the world’s beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight. ‘Now,’ he went on, licking his dry lips with patent ogreishness. ‘Tell me how you came to be so very far from home.’
The pastilles rattled like beads against the boy’s little teeth. The parrot worked its graphite blue beak fondly through his hair. The boy sighed, an apologetic shrug taking momentary hold of his shoulders. Then he turned and went back the way he had come.
‘Neun neun drei acht zwei sechs sieben,’ said the parrot, as they walked off into the wavering green vastness of the afternoon.
II
There were so many queer aspects to Sunday dinner at the Panicker table that Mr Shane, the new arrival, aroused the suspicions of his fellow lodger Mr Parkins merely by seeming to take no notice of any of them. He strode into the dining room, a grand, rubicund fellow who set the floorboards to creaking mightily when he trod them and who looked as if he keenly felt the lack of a pony between his legs. He wore his penny-red hair cropped close to the scalp and there was something indefinitely colonial, a nasal echo of cantonment or goldfields, in his speech. He nodded in turn to Parkins, to the refugee child, and to Reggie Panicker, and then flung himself into his chair like a boy settling onto the back of a school chum for a ride across the lawn. Immediately he struck up a conversation with the elder Panicker on the subject of American roses, a subject about which, he freely admitted, he knew nothing.
A profound reservoir of poise, or a pathological deficit of curiosity, Parkins supposed, might explain the near-total lack of interest that Mr Shane, who gave himself out to be a traveller in milking equipment for the firm of Chedbourne & Jones, Yorkshire, appeared to take in the nature of his interlocutor, Mr Panicker, who was not only a Malayalee from Kerala, black as a boot-heel, but also a high-church Anglican vicar. Politesse or stupidity, perhaps, might also prevent him from remarking on the sullen way in which Reggie Panicker, the vicar’s grown son, was gouging a deep hole in the tatted tablecloth with the point of his fish knife, as well as of the presence at the table of a mute nine-year-old boy whose face was like a blank back page from the book of human sorrows. But it was the way in which Mr Shane paid so little attention to the boy’s parrot that made it impossible for Mr Parkins to accept the new lodger at face value. No one could be immune to the interest that inhered in the parrot, even if, as now, the bird was merely reciting bits and scraps of poems of Goethe and Schiller known to every German schoolchild over the age of seven. Mr Parkins, who had, for reasons of his own, long kept the African grey under careful observation, immediately saw in the new lodger a potential rival in his ongoing quest to solve the deepest and most vexing mystery of the remarkable African bird. Clearly, Someone Important had heard about the numbers, and had sent Mr Shane to hear them for himself.
‘Well, here we are.’ Into the dining room swung Mrs Panicker, carrying a Spode tureen. She was a large, plain, flaxen-haired Oxfordshirewoman whose unimaginably wild inspiration of thirty years past, to marry her father’s coal-eyed, serious young assistant minister from India, had borne fruit far mealier than the ripe rosy pawpaws which she had, breathing in the scent of Mr K.T. Panicker’s hair oil on a warm summer evening in 1913, permitted herself to anticipate. But she kept an excellent table, one that merited the custom of a far greater number of lodgers than the Panicker household currently enjoyed. The living was a minor one, the black vicar locally unpopular, the parishioners stingy as flints, and the Panicker family, in spite of Mrs Panicker’s thrift and stern providence, uncomfortably poor. It was only Mrs Panicker’s lavishly tended kitchen garden and culinary knack that could make possible a fine cold cucumber and chervil soup such as the one that she now proposed, lifting the lid of the tureen, to Mr Shane, for whose sudden presence in the house, with two months paid in advance, she was clearly grateful.
‘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