Dizzy was adamant that it must have been Murder. ‘Every instinct is telling me. We were the first on the scene. Do you remember the sense of crime that was hanging in the air?’
I had exactly the same feeling.
VII
A SPEECH TO A POODLE
A Horse misused upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
The Police harassed us all several times more. In law-abiding fashion, we presented ourselves for questioning, and took the opportunity to see to various things in town – we bought seeds, applied for an EU grant, and once we went to the cinema. For we always went together, even if only one of us was being questioned. Oddball admitted to the Police that he had heard the Commandant’s car whining and wheezing as it drove past our houses that afternoon. He said that the Commandant always drove along the side roads when he was drunk, so he hadn’t been particularly surprised. The policemen who took his statements must have been embarrassed.
Unfortunately, I could not confirm what Oddball had said, although I very much wanted to. ‘I was at home, I didn’t hear any cars, nor did I see the Commandant. I must have been topping up the stove in the boiler room, and noises from the road aren’t audible in there.’
And I soon stopped caring about it, though for the past few weeks the entire district had talked of nothing else, coming up with ever more elaborate theories. I simply did my best to ward off my thoughts on the matter – are there so few deaths around that one should take an obsessive interest in this one?
I went back to one of my Enquiries. This time I carefully analysed the television schedule for as many channels as I could and studied the correlation between the contents of the films being broadcast and the configuration of the Planets on a given day. The mutual connections between them were highly distinct and plain to see. I had often wondered if the people who did the television programming were trying to display to us their extensive astrological knowledge. Or perhaps they just arranged the schedule unconsciously, unaffected by this vast store of knowledge. It could in fact be true that the correlations exist outside us, but that we pick them up quite unconsciously. For the time being I had limited my research to a small scale, only covering a few titles. For instance, I had noticed that a film entitled The Medium, very strange and thrilling, had been shown on television when the transiting Sun was entering an aspect with Pluto and the Planets in Scorpio. The film was about the desire for immortality and how to take possession of the human will. There was talk in it about states bordering on death, sexual obsession and other Plutonic matters.
I succeeded in observing similar conformities with regard to the Alien films, set on a spaceship. Here subtle dependencies between Pluto, Neptune and Mars came into play. As soon as Mars was in aspect to these two Slow Planets at the same time, the television showed a repeat of one of the Alien films. Isn’t that fascinating?
Coincidences of this kind are astonishing. I have enough empirical material to write an entire book about it. But for the time being I made do with a short essay, which I sent to several weeklies. I don’t think anyone will publish it, but perhaps someone will Reflect on it.
In mid-March, once I was feeling completely well again, I set off on a wider round, meaning that I didn’t limit myself to inspecting the houses that were left in my care, but chose to turn an even bigger circle, going all the way to the forest, then across the meadows to the highway, making a stop at the precipice.
At this time of year the world is at its most detestable. There are still large white patches of snow on the ground, hard and compacted, barely recognisable as the lovely, innocent fluff that falls at Christmas to our great joy. Now it’s like a knife blade, like a metal surface. It’s difficult to walk across, it traps the legs. If not for tall snow boots, it would wound the calves. The sky is low and grey – it looks as if you could reach out and touch it from the top of a small hill.
As I walked, I considered the fact that I wouldn’t be able to go on living here forever, in this house on the Plateau, guarding the other houses. Eventually the Samurai would break down and there’d be no way to drive into town. The wooden steps would rot, snow would tear off the gutters, the stove would stop working, and one freezing cold February the pipes would burst. And I would grow weaker too. My Ailments were destroying my body, gradually, relentlessly. Each year my knees ached more, and my liver was clearly no longer fit for purpose. After all, I’ve been alive a long time. That’s what I was thinking, rather pitifully. But one day I would have to start giving it all some proper thought.
Just then I saw a fast and agile swarm of Fieldfares. These are Birds that I only ever see in a flock. They move nimbly, like one large piece of living fretwork in the air. I read somewhere that were a Predator to attack them, one of those languid Hawks that hover in the sky like the Holy Spirit, for instance, the Fieldfares will defend themselves. For as a flock they’re capable of fighting, in a very special, perfidious way, and also of taking revenge – they swiftly soar into the air, then in perfect unison they defecate on their oppressor – dozens of white droppings land on the predator’s lovely wings, soiling them, gluing them together, and coating the feathers in corrosive acid. This forces the Hawk to come to its senses, cease its pursuit and land on the grass in disgust. It may well die of revulsion, so badly polluted are its feathers. It spends the whole day cleaning them, and then the next day too. It doesn’t sleep, it cannot sleep with such dirty wings. It’s sickened by its own overwhelming stink. It’s like a Mouse, like a Frog, like carrion. It can’t remove the hardened excrement with its beak, it’s freezing cold, and now the rainwater can easily pervade its glued-up feathers to reach its fragile skin. Its own kind, other Hawks, shun it too. It seems to them leprous, infected by a vile disease. Its majesty has been injured. All this is unbearable for the Hawk, and sometimes the Bird will die.
Now the Fieldfares, aware of their strength in numbers, were frolicking in front of me, performing aerobatics.
I also watched a pair of Magpies, and was surprised they had ventured all the way to the Plateau. But I know that these Birds spread their range faster than others, and in the near future they’ll be everywhere, as Pigeons are today. One for sorrow, two for joy. So they said when I was a child, but there were fewer Magpies then. Last autumn, after the nesting season, I would see hundreds of them flying off to their night roost. I wonder if that means joy multiplied.
I watched the Magpies as they bathed in a puddle of melted snow. They gave me sidelong glances, but clearly weren’t afraid of me, for they boldly went on spattering the water with their wings and dipping their heads in it. Seeing their joy, no one could doubt how much fun a bath of this kind must be.
Apparently Magpies cannot live without frequent baths. What’s more, they’re intelligent and insolent. As everyone knows, they steal material for their nests from other Birds and carry off shiny objects to put in them. I have also heard that sometimes they make mistakes and take glowing cigarette butts to their nests; like this they become fire-raisers, and burn down the building on which they’ve built their nest. Our good old Magpie has a lovely name in Latin: Pica pica.
How great and full of life the world is.
Far in the distance I also saw a familiar Fox whom I call Consul, so refined and well-bred is he. He always wanders the same paths; the winter reveals his routes – straight as an arrow, purposeful. He’s an old dog fox, he comes and goes from the Czech Republic – clearly he has business to attend to over here. I watched him through binoculars as he loped downhill at a light trot, following the tracks he’d left in the snow the last time he came this way – perhaps to make his potential stalkers think he’d only done it once. It was like seeing an old friend. Suddenly I noticed that this time Consul had turned off the beaten track and before I knew it, he’d vanished in the brushwood growing on the field boundary. There was a hunting pulpit at that spot, and another one a few hundred metres further on. I’d had dealings with them in the past. The Fox was gone from my sight, and as I had nothing else to do, I walked along the edge of the forest after him.