In the Land of Armadillos (7 page)

When Adela was in the room, Toby's bereaved eyes came to life, there was color in his cheeks, he even straightened up a little. Max was delighted.

“It's Haas,” he rebuked her mildly, then took a bite of the cake. It had the texture of pudding, tasting of butter and plums, of childhood, reminiscent of a bracing walk through autumn leaves, sitting around a good fire. He cut a wedge and offered it to Toby, who refused it with a terse shake of the head. “You've got to live, Toby,” he reminded him.

“Those are your rules, not mine.”

Max grimaced at Adela, arching his eyebrows and tipping his head to one side
, See what I have to deal with?
She bent a fierce, tender look at Toby, then left the room. Together, they listened to the sound of her slippers scuffing down the stairs until it disappeared.

“You have feelings for her, don't you,” he said jubilantly.

Toby glanced at him, fear stuttering to life in his eyes.

“Why are you looking at me like that? I couldn't be happier for you. You need a woman in your life, Toby. I don't know what I'd do without my Gerda. For me, my family is an island of peace in a crazy world.”

“I have no peace,” murmured Toby, leaning his forehead against the glass. “I will never have peace again.”

“Toby,” he said gently. He quelled the desire to put his arm around the drooping shoulders, to ruffle the unruly hair, to make shadow animals, anything to distract him, as if he were Peter, from whatever nightmare had sent him into tears. “You can't go on like this. The world is a harsh place for someone as sensitive as you. You need to be more like me. You have to learn to let some things go. Otherwise, how could anybody go on living?”

Toby closed his eyes, thrust his head away. A small, choked sound escaped his throat.

“I know it hurts you to talk about these things, but someone has to say it. A man like you needs a man like me. Believe me, Toby. You have to get back to work.

“I want you to write me a story,” Max continued. “A children's book. A present for Peter.”

Toby pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “I know you mean well, Max,” he said dully. “But I can't. I just can't.”

“I'll help you,” he said, encouraging him. “You tell me the words. I'll write it down.”

“I'm clean out of ideas, Max. There's nothing left.”

His fingers drummed on his uniformed knee. “How about this. A good German story with a knight in it. Maybe he has to slay a dragon . . . rescue a princess . . . there's a treasure.”

“Knights and princesses?” Toby was half dismayed, half amused. “I don't know. I'm not Walt Disney. It's not really my style.”

“Well, you're the author. Do it in your own style.”

Toby breathed on the windowpane. With his finger, he drew a forlorn little house in the fogged glass, a square with a triangle for a roof, a chimney with smoke coming out of it. “What do you have against dragons?”

“Don't be silly. Dragons steal sheep, ruin crops, burn down the town. They have to be destroyed. Even children know that.”

The artist sighed and bowed his head. Max waited. Just when he was beginning to think that Toby was purposefully toying with him, the dark rumpled head snapped to attention, the pouchy eyes narrowed. The wisp of light in his pupils kindled into flame. “Once upon a time . . .”

“Now you're talking!” Max said enthusiastically, rubbing his hands together. “Is Peter going to be the knight?”

“Patience,” Toby said. He closed his eyes, repeated the four words as reverently as if they were a prayer. “Once upon a time, there was a little boy.”

“Wait a minute! I need to write this down.”

“Here, use this.” Toby pounced on his portfolio, slipped out another drawing. A clown and a skeleton flanked the wings of a dark stage, peering out of furled theater curtains. Below them, a naked beauty sat astride a prancing white steed with a flowing mane. A drawing for a theater poster advertising a play whose curtain had rung down long ago.

“Toby, this is beautiful. I can't.”

“Of course you can. This is important.” He swept away the tubes of paint with the side of his arm, slapped the drawing facedown on the desk. Then he returned to his post at the window, wrapped his bony arms tightly around his scarecrow body. “As I was saying . . . there was a little boy who loved birds more than anything in the world. When the boy was little, he begged his mother to leave food outside their window for the pigeons, and colored strings for the sparrows to build their nests. The year he turned ten, his grandmother gave him an illustrated book of birds with large, colorful plates. Instead of playing with the other boys after school, he would go home, climb upstairs to the attic, and study his picture book. In this way, he learned about big birds and small birds, swimming birds, flightless birds, drab birds, and birds that looked like they had been painted by madmen. He studied the faraway lands they came from, their individual calls, their diets, and their habitats.

“It was inevitable that one day the birds would communicate with him. The first bird to speak was the white stork, of the kind you can see nesting in tall chimneys. ‘Peter,' it said in the voice of someone old and wise. ‘You who admire us and are loyal to us, you who have been a true friend to all birds, upon you we have bestowed the gift of flight. Go to the window. Flap your arms, and you will see you can fly.' ”

There was a loud slap as Toby flung open the attic window.

“Peter threw open the windows,” he continued in a thrilling, powerful voice. “It was a warm evening in late spring; a cloudless sky beckoned him. He spread his arms, closed his eyes, and jumped.

“The birds were true to their word: The boy could fly. Flapping his arms, he swooped over the roofs of the town. In a delirium of joy, he soared over the school playing fields, he made loop-de-loops over the church's bell tower.

“Meanwhile, in the town square, a crowd was gathering. What was it? ‘A bird,' someone ventured. No, it was judged to be too large. ‘An eagle is large,' said someone else. ‘That's no eagle' was the reply. Someone shouted that they saw horns. Another, sharp teeth. A third, a whiplike, pointed tail.

“One of the boy's classmates picked up a loose paving stone and let fly. The stone struck the creature's head and bounced off.

“It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, dazed by the blow. Now each villager reached for a missile. Under a barrage of pebbles, bricks, and stones, it plummeted to earth.”

Toby's voice changed now, dark, fluid, impassioned, like a tune played on the Pied Piper's flute.

“When the citizens of the town gathered around the corpse of the demon they had stoned out of the sky, they saw only the broken body of the dreamy little boy who had lived in the house on the edge of the square. One of his classmates recalled that he had loved birds. Also that he had been good at playing marbles.

“Just then Peter's mother came out of her house, drawn by the crowd in the market square. The throngs of villagers parted guiltily before her. ‘What happened?' she cried, cradling her son's lifeless body.” Toby thrust out his arms as if reaching for the boy himself. “There was a long, drawn-out silence. And then the mayor spoke. ‘He jumped out from there,' he said, pointing at the open attic window. ‘He thought he could fly.'

“The boy's blood ran between the cracks of the paving stones. As it soaked into the earth, a sapling shot up out of the ground at the very center of the market square. While the people watched in awe, it grew into an enormous acacia tree, towering over every building in town. Stranger still, upon each branch sat a bird: strange, exotic birds, of every shape and color, birds that were not native to the town or even to the continent of Europe. The birds stared down at the townspeople; the people stared up at the birds. As if someone had given a sign, the birds all rose up with a deafening cacophony, their wings flapping, each bird cawing or clattering its bill. The birds flew around the town square once, then disappeared.

“All at once, nature went silent. No nightingales sang, no mockingbirds. No doves cooed, no hummingbirds flew, no starlings, no sparrows, no wrens, no owls. The storks abandoned their nests, the pigeons, the square. Even the crows deserted the town.

“After burying her son, Peter's mother hurriedly moved away. As if by agreement, no one spoke of the shameful incident.

“Years passed. In the summer, the tree gave shade. In the spring, racemes of tiny heart-shaped flowers. In the winter, its bark was a beautiful collage of silvers and grays. But in the fall, the leaves flamed a bloody red, and the people would remember the boy who had loved birds, and the atrocity they had committed together in the name of fear and superstition.”

Here, Toby paused, aiming a sideways glance at Max. Max grew impatient. What was he waiting for? “Go on,” he urged. He wanted to know how it ended.

Toby shot him a look of incredulity before going on. “No one knows who left the first note,” he said. “But one day there it was, lying in the tree's roots, pinned to a red poppy. It read,
I remember.

“By the next day, there were twenty notes, by the third, hundreds.

“
I'm sorry,
they said
. I missed you at school. I missed you at aviation club. I think of you every day of my life. I never meant you any harm. My father made me. Everybody else was doing it. I am ashamed of my behavior on that day. Forgive me. Forgive us.
By the end of the week, an avalanche of notes and flowers spilled over the plaza, the flowers sanctifying the air like incense.

“Finally, a cry was raised. The townspeople mourned for the boy who dared to fly, and atoned for their terrible crime. At that very moment, a great swarm of birds blackened the sky, descending on the town in numbers never seen in recorded history. Flamingos and egrets, starlings and macaws, peacocks and sparrows, cranes and canaries, the rarest exotic birds of the world could be seen roosting side by side on the enormous tree in the middle of the marketplace; you couldn't see the leaves for the feathers.”

Toby paused here, his index finger caressing his lower lip. Did he already know how the story would end? Or was he making it up as he went along?

“One by one, the people of the town came out of their houses to join their neighbors around the tree. When the last citizen had arrived, the birds began to caw and flap their wings. And then they took off, blinding the villagers with a whirling vortex of multi-hued feathers.

“When the thick cloud of grit had cleared, the tree was gone, crumbled into powder at the villagers' feet. Mourning doves with purple throats strutted through the sawdust, cooing, leaving delicate footprints. A snow-white stork settled onto a long-abandoned nest on top of a house. Sparrows picked up straws in their beaks and went straight to work. From that day forward, wherever the townspeople went, they were accompanied by the songs of birds. It filled their lives with beautiful music, but it also reminded them of what they were capable of.
Remember,
the songs warned them,
and do not forget
.”

Toby was finished. The delirium evoked by his voice evaporated, leaving a husk of a man standing before an open window, with the cold air blowing through his hair.

Max got to his feet. With an ominous thunk, he pulled the windows shut. “I don't like it,” he grumbled. “Not at all appropriate for a child.”

The fire in Toby's eyes died back to a flicker. “Everyone's a critic,” he said.

The SS man caught Toby's arm above the elbow and squeezed hard. “I get it, Toby,” he said softly. “I know what the story is about. The villagers throwing stones at the innocent boy are the Germans, aren't they. You're saying that after this period of senseless killing, there will be an era of remorse and reflection, and then we will all have to learn to live with what we've done. Do I have that right?”

Toby cringed under his touch. Max leaned over him, bringing his flat, smooth face even closer. “You're an artist, Toby. You have the luxury of being able to think in this way. As for me, I am a soldier. I deal with reality. And the reality is, Germany has enemies everywhere, enemies who wish to see her destroyed, enemies who must be put down with force. You know as well as I do, Stalin is the real villain in this war. Although it comes at a price, we must be vigilant.”

Affectionately, he patted Toby's shoulder. “Don't feel bad,” he said. “We'll keep working on it. Maybe we should just go with my idea. The knight slays the dragon, finds the gold, and marries the princess. The important thing is, we made a start today.” He shook his head, marveling at the randomness of life. “If you would have told me six months ago that my Peter would be a character in a book by Tobias Rey . . . ”

“A book that will never be published,” Toby murmured, looking down into the street.

“Uch, such a pessimist,” said Max cheerfully, getting to his feet. He buttoned his uniform jacket, pulled on his jackboots. “I'd better get back to work. Lunchtime already, and just look at me, sitting around with my feet up, listening to fairy tales.”

His good humor had been restored. At least Toby's story had taken his mind off of the loss of his horse. Feeling generous, he said, “Why don't you take the rest of the afternoon off? Adela, too.”

Toby stood out in silhouette against the window, his gaunt body bent and black like a punctuation mark. Behind him, the outside world, slanted tile roofs, elegant townhouses, empty yards full of yellow weeds, soldiers pursuing Jews down dead ends and narrow alleyways.

“Thank you, Max,” he said. A smile of surprising sweetness touched the ironic lips. Suddenly, he doubled over, his whole body wrenched by deep, hacking coughs.

Max slipped on his gloves. “That does it. I want you to see a doctor. I'll have my secretary arrange it.”