The Garden Party

The following is an excerpt from the author’s novel To The Madhouse.

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Down in the courtyard beneath the blooming ginko, Nelly Blum handed us each an invitation. The card was heavy in my hand, and in old-style type it announced that on the afternoon of June 23rd, 1913, she would host a great Midsummer gathering at her estate on a lake to the west of Berlin. This party was the latest iteration of a long family tradition. Her parents had always celebrated the Summer Solstice to connect them with the earth and with the people among whom they lived, even if those people saw no connection at all. Nelly and her brother had embraced their parents' sentiment, making Midsummer the toast of their artistic circle in Berlin. The Solstice both established and affirmed their place, and they spent lavishly on the dishes, the drinks, the serving staff, and the great bonfire that always capped the night. They invited painters and poets, novelists and sculptors, lecturers in the sciences and in the classics, the doyennes and the (reasonably) destitute, all of them drawn from the cafes, parlors, and publications to which the Blums had extended their patronage. 

Stepping up onto the bench that encircled the gingko, Nelly laid out the plan. We would be picked up at the station by carriages, and the readings, to highlight writers published in her journal, would begin at four. My friend Robert Martin's reading would follow theirs, and Lene Winter would close out the show. Nelly drew the two beside her. “To our newest members.” She led them in a bow, as if already on the stage. “Do us proud.”

On the afternoon of the 23rd I begged off my commitments and left the office around noon. I had my suit brushed, I went for a shave, and I spent an hour or so strolling through the Secession. I was to meet my friends at the station, and we would take the train together. But they were not there, and with the afternoon drawing down, I took the next train out west, past the city limits. 

When I disembarked, there was no cab to be found. Instead, I found myself on a quiet suburban street with a small village behind me, a great towering forest ahead, and only a sandy drive between two brick gateposts to guide my way. I checked the invitation, folded it up, checked it again. Here was the stop, and there the destination.  I crossed between the posts and started out into the forest. Perhaps I would meet the carriage along the way.

I walked until the trees had closed over the entrance and no trace of any human thing remained. The air was dusky and dim. Birds called and trunks creaked and unseen things thundered about in the underbrush, and when the wind came up the whole of the wood seemed to breathe, to howl. Every sound sped my step. My hair fell out of place, my suit grew rumpled, I got dirt in my cuffs and sand in my shoes. 

After perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps an hour, the track brightened, I turned a bend, and stepped out before the columned entrance to an old-style villa. The building rose up three stories, with a porthole into the attic and wings projecting out on either side. A pair of horse teams dozed in their harnesses on the gravel drive, shit smoking under their hooves. The scene was silent, hushed, and no voice reached me.

I rang at the double-door, and got no answer. Figures moved in the dusk behind the glass, footsteps clapping across the parquet. I rang again, and heard the bell singing dimly out, deep within the house. 

Only with my third furious ring did one of those figures pause and turn its step towards me. The servant Ilse opened the door, confused. 

“Hr. Silber?” She looked me up and down, lingering on the creases and stains. “Did you walk all the way here?”

“Well I certainly would have been earlier had someone bothered to pick me up.”

“We stopped the carriages hours ago.”

“Then this must be quite an empty party.” I took out my invitation.  “The performance hasn’t even begun.”

“Oh, Hr. Silber,” she moaned, ushering me into the house. “The performance is almost over!” 

With quick, quiet steps and apron held in her hands, she guided me from the hall into a parlor and from there into the main hallway of the house.  “Of course, of course,” she muttered. “Of course they forgot, of course I have to fix everything, of course they will blame me, of course, of course, of course.”

Down the communicating doors I could see room after room arranged with paintings and tapestries, abstract sculptures and arrangements of fresh flowers, dark wooden dinner sets and quilted sofas and corners cut off by painted screens. Deep down at the very end was a room lined like a surgery in gleaming white tile. Through it all advanced a small army of servants, maids and servers and cooks slipping from room to room with a banquet’s-worth of food piled up on platters and plates, buckets of drink, towers of crystal cups, oysters nestled into ice-beds, box on box of china and silverware and much, much more besides. One young woman in white-and-black slipped a pastry under her apron, another flirted with a bowtied server, a third tossed a bit of rare meat right into her friend’s yawning mouth. Yet the vastness of the house swallowed up their voices, so that they seemed to go about their work in silence, like servants in a fairy tale, or a dream.

“Hurry, hurry.” Ilse tugged me by the sleeve. “Do you want to miss the whole thing?” 

She led me through a side door and into an overgrown garden, a wild space abloom with tulips and poppies, daisies and foxtails, hydrangeas and marigolds and sunflowers, a virtual jungle of heavy-headed and swollen-bellied flowers bulging and seeding and drooping and preening in curtain after curtain . 

“Just don’t make a fuss,” she whispered, leading me through the flowers where to a pair of cane chairs sat at a cut in the undergrowth. “No one will know you’re back here. They’ll think you’ve seen the whole thing.”

“But…” I muttered, taking my seat in confusion. “But where’s the show?” Illse put a finger to her lips, and drew back the flowering veil.

A series of terraced beds reached down from the deck to the lawn, forming a kind of amphitheater between the ivy-covered wings. A stage had been erected atop the red-brick patio at the foot of the garden. It was set on three sides with screens so tall they blocked out the rest of the lawn, large white sheets adorned with a great dense filigreed pattern of flowers and leaves, a carefully cultivated image beside all this wild greenery. The central sheet had been painted with a large silver medallion, emblazoned with a great letter B.

A crowd of one hundred or more had been seated all throughout the garden, an entire audience hidden away amidst the flowers. From above it looked like a great beehive, tall trellised walls marking out little cells of three or four cane chairs apiece. The men wore simple dark suits, the ladies long thin dresses of blues and whites and reds. Some members of the audience stood to stretch their legs, rising on tip-toe to speak above the blooms. Then a voice called out, and the crowd settled back down into their seats, and were hidden from one another once more.

It was Nelly. She stood on the stage in a gown of forest green. From the waist up the dress had been stitched with an elaborate pattern of blossoms and stars in silver thread, and her belt glimmered with every phase of the moon. She looked like a sorceress, and when she raised her hands it seemed as if she were about to turn the day to night. 

But instead her bracelets jangled and her hands came together and a single resounding crack rang like a bell across the yard. “Well, she announced, “we’ve just about made it. Supper is already on the way. But first! Just two more. If you’ve missed a few issues of our journal, I’m afraid you might have not know our next reader. Yes, he is a fine man, a good man—perhaps the last honest man in all of Berlin.”

Surely Robert could not be Nelly’s honest man. And yet there he was, shuffling up onto the stage in his new clothes and his bowler and, as so often lately, with a few pages held out before him like an offering. He wore a small blue cornflower in his buttonhole, and red silk for a hatband. His mustache had grown even shaggier. He looked every bit and more that humble artist, he looked like he was wearing a costume, he looked—yes, ridiculous.

Nelly touched his shoulder, and then Robert stood there alone at the center of the stage. The applause faded. His mouth hung open, he shrunk downward at the shoulders, and he stepped softly from one foot to the other. Did he look out on a stern, stuffy crowd or a garden abandoned and overgrown? Which would have scared him the more? “Many thanks,” he muttered.

And then another, very different voice boomed out across the courtyard, brimful of false bravado. “I began to write,” he began to read, “in the hope that I might write myself out of existence. If I said everything worth saying, what reason would I have to remain? I had hoped to make an effigy of my words, a likeness in book form, precise down to the last hair, and when I finished, I planned to drop this idol into the furnace and open wide the flue. Now, do not be concerned: I still plan on all this and much more. By journal’s end nothing more of me will remain. But I have made a mistake, a miscalculation. So much more remains to be written that I fear I might never touch my toe to the bottom. The world is conspiring to ruin me, to corrupt me, to debase and degrade me, by which I mean: to make a writer out of me. ”

It was the latest installment of his novel, that story of a secretary trying his best to keep his head down and work on. Yet Robert did not sound like the man I knew. He over-enunciated the consonants and drew out the vowels, the voice of the provincial eager to pass as cosmopolitan, of the amateur attempting to prove himself fluent in unfamiliar material. 

He continued on. “My chance came late one afternoon. The good Herr. had called me to his study and handed over the latest installment of his novel before hurrying off to lunch. I was seated there, faithfully copying every word, when I came to the following scene. The professor is seated for dinner alongside his wife. A pair of her relations have stopped by on their way up the country for the summer. In fact, Ursula is to pack off with them to the family estate, leaving the professor alone until the end of term. He has told her that the separation of some few weeks will do them both good, that he will finish his last lectures and get to work on an article of urgent import. He has even affected a tone of false mourning, as if some part of him will die with her absence. But of course he is shivering all over beneath his frills and his tails, for he is thinking only of those many imminent unmolested hours with Monika in his arms. They are halfway through the fish when Ursula’s cousin looks up and asks: ‘Whatever happened with old cousin Olaf’s bastard? We sent her to you and then forgot all about it. You can’t just turn up on a respectable door-step with some sentimental tale and a few letters and expect a handout.’

“Friedrich’s wife lets out a bitter chuckle. ‘And, fools that we are, what do you think, that we up and did? I put her in the kitchen, I wanted her out of my sight. But now where, to my shock and surprise, do you think I find her? Dusting the shelves, shaking out the sheets—and doing a damn poor job of it. You were right about her. She’s a devious little witch, she convinces these poor country maids to do every least little thing for her, and she’s always disappearing I-don’t-know-where-to. Bastard or no, she hardly seems worth the expense.’

“This was the key moment, the deciding instant. For as I copied out this latest chapter, I saw that the kindly Herr, the most warmhearted and magnanimous Baron, had, in the thick of his work, allowed Friedrich to sit still, and to say nothing. Not so much as a word in defense of this poor serving woman who had thrown wide the curtains and drawn up the windows and let bright light and warming draughts back into his life. And as I sat there, my pen poised over a fresh page, I saw not Friedrich in his dining room or Monika in her quarters, but Vera with the next day’s paper opened up before her—and I saw that she was disappointed. Wasn’t this her story as much it was the Baron’s? I could already read her latest letter, I shivered at her cold tone, her brief admonishing statements and her steadfast avowal never to read or write us again.”

Yes, he was acting the fool for this crowd. He played on their prejudices, their blithe self-assurance that of course such a silly-looking man would throw somersaults and walk on his hands and reveal his most humiliating secrets for so much as a single fleeting moment of their half-lapsed attention. He used to speak honestly, from the heart. Now it all sounded like one great joke, for him and for them.

“So I touched my pen to the paper,” he went on, “and I wrote: Friedrich places his knife back upon his plate, he puts his hand atop the tablecloth, he allows himself one quick clearing of his throat, and then he says: ‘Monika serves us well. I am pleased to have her in our employ.’ 

“And that is all, the whole of it, nothing more. The scene goes on unchanged, and the installment soon ends with the professor bundling his wife into the carriage and waving her off. But Friedrich has registered his protest—and I have registered mine, as simply and as softly as I dare. 

“Several days later, we received the next of Vera’s letters, full of precisely the sort of pleasant insights which made up her normal correspondence. But as I opened the letter, I found another piece of paper, no more than a scrap, folded up within. ‘I don’t know who will receive this,’ she began. ‘I don’t know to whom I now write. For the past weeks I have read the Baron’s novel, and I sensed, however dimly, another hand at work in the margins. You have shown yourself, at long last. I feel,’ she abruptly concluded,’ that you have made some small change for me, and it gladdens me to end.’ On the back she had added, ‘write me again’ and then she had folded up the note before the ink had even time to dry.”

The applause was generous, polite. It surprised me. Did they not know that the joke was on them? Did they really not see the trick? Robert bowed once, twice, a third time, so low that his mustache threatened to brush against his shoes. Couldn’t they see him, that clown?

I began to rise. It certainly felt as if something had ended. And then Lene crossed the stage, and I sat again. Her dress tonight was still black, still long, but she had unhooked the two top buttons to reveal a gold chain’s glimmering in pale hollow of her throat. She waved off the applause, and in a cool clear voice she read a single poem unlike anything she had written before. She had called it “My Heart.” 

“Once I am dead

Stand at my gate

Bloom in my blood

Wipe clean your feet 

Coming in from the cold

Reach out

Through the darkness

Take my hand

In your hand

Take my heart

In your teeth

And drink deep

Until your mouth 

Is full of blood

And my body

Has dripped dry.”

That’s all; there was nothing more. She had said it all, and we had missed it. 

Nelly mounted her stage for the final time. She thanked the performers, she thanked the audience, she asked us all to stay for the remaining festivities. Then, with a wave of her hands, the sheets fell one after another to reveal a great lawn rolling through hedges and lindens towards a distant lakeshore. A tree-lined path led to a group of long slim rowboats beside a stone jetty. Down the center ran a long table, set with places enough for a small town. Servants were already striding out from the wings, toting platters and bottles and small green glasses halfway filled with some dark drink.  

The servants had already pulled apart the stage, and the partygoers were strolling their way down towards the lake, glasses in their hands, skirts trailing behind them through the grass. A small crowd had gathered at the head of the table. Everyone was present: Nelly’s brother Marcel, her partner Katherine, and the poet Lene. Only our host and my friend were absent.

Marcel Blum brushed a crumb from his beard. “Tell me about that tall friend of yours I realize that I’ve stepped into the middle of something, but I couldn’t quite place him. All of that stuff about the secretary and the mistress struck me as a little obtuse. Like a joke.”

“I don’t think so,” said Lene. “I think he spoke quite clearly, about the only things that matter.”

Marcel chuckled. “And what might those things be?”

“How to live with another and remain yourself.” 

“So the problems of love.”

Lene startled. “I don’t think he would call it that.”

“Then how would you put it? The letter-writer, the secret correspondent, however you want to describe her. Don’t you think he is in love?”  

“I don’t know.” She smiled a great, toothy smile, and for the first time, I noticed three silver caps on her upper left jaw. “But I know he’ll tell me.”

Katherine was the first to notice me standing there. “Looks like Peter has arrived at long last.” 

Lene glared at me from across the circle. “I’m sure you ended up missing the most of it. When did you see fit to arrive?”

“I wasn’t late.” I pulled the now quite creased invitation from my pocket. “I should have been on time.”

“That changed a few days ago. Didn’t Robert let you know?” 

“I haven’t seen him.”

Katherine had spent the past conversation craning her neck and looking anxiously all about. “I saw Nelly leading him off somewhere.”

“Down the lawn?”

“Into the house.”

“Well,” said Lene, “we can hardly celebrate without the man of the hour. Be a dear and find him, won’t you Peter?”

“I don’t know this place,” I stammered. “Where would I even look?” But the circle had closed back up before me, and no one would answer.

Ilse seemed like the woman to ask. But she naturally had her hands full directing the servants. “Madame gives me too much, she expects me to turn day into night, I can’t be in charge of you too,” she grumbled, waving me off into the darkness of the house. I begged her for a hint at least. She pointed up at the ceiling before whisking off to berate the hired help.

I wandered back to the main hall and up the stairs. In a far room at the corner of the house, a tall panel had been swung away to reveal a narrow servant’s stair set within the wall. A woman’s voice—Nelly’s voice—came faintly down the stairwell, and every now and again I heard a man laughing alongside her. 

I rose from the narrow stair and into a long light-filled attic-room that ran the length of the house. The arched ceiling had been painted sky blue and the walls were frescoed with peeling images of forests and fields, deserts and jungles, the tundra and the rolling sea, and all the space in between covered with a plantation of bushes and trees. And amidst it all, perching, feeding, soaring, sleeping, and flitting from bough to bough were all manner of tropical birds, perhaps twenty or thirty in all: cockatoos and parakeets, a kingbird and a toucan, a half-dozen parrots, macaws in blue and green and yellow and red. A small woman in a white smock moved throughout the aviary with a watering can under her arm, a green-necked lovebird riding along on her shoulder. 

A strange enough sight. But stranger still, these birds spoke, not to one another, not in bird song, but to the universe, and in human words, in a cacophony of German and French and Italian and Dutch and English and Yiddish phrases. “Over hills now repose,” sang one red-blue parrot. “The dreadful nights I owed!” hummed a shy macaw. “The gilding sticks to our fingers.” “The vast tomb of the universe!” “The bloom of my joy.” They were speaking to one another in scraps of literature, in phrases so often read out and repeated that they had lodged in the minds of these creatures who could not help but repeat and repeat and repeat those same beautiful fragments back, without ever once grasping their meaning. 

“I am not a writer,” rang out from behind a large bush. “I am not, I am not.”

It was Robert. Or more precisely: Robert as voiced by Selma, Nelly’s favorite cockatoo. For when I pushed through the branches, I found the bird perched upon the brim of the bowler held out by Robert, cooing and singing and nuzzling at his fingers. “I am not!” she cried, as if in triumph, and Nelly handed over a gooseberry from the hollow of her hand. 

“Be careful with her,” she said, passing the bird another berry. “Your words run through her head day and night. You could spare a thought for the effect they might have.” 

“There’s no effect to think over,” he replied, stroking the bird along her crest. “No one takes my writing seriously, her least of all.”

“Well she clearly does not agree.” 

“I don’t see how that could possibly be true.” Robert looked up and caught sight of me mired in the bush. “Ah, Peter! So you have shown up. I was worried you would miss the party.”

“I—I—” For the final time, I pulled the crumpled and battered invitation from my pocket. “I tried my best. See? Right here. I came at the time you set.”

“Oh, poor Peter.” Nelly reached out to console me. “I really must apologize. We wanted to slip some more readers on the schedule, but that would have meant cutting dinner short, and we couldn’t have had that. Everyone has come so far out from the city, they all deserve to enjoy their meal. So we decided to move the show up by a couple of hours, and we thought Robert would let you know.”

“Everyone is looking for him outside,” I said. “They sent me to find you.”

“I wanted to show him his biggest fan, and to speak in private. Well.” She gestured around at the gibbering birds. “Of a kind, anyway. We were just talking—”

“About the bird.”

“—about Lene.” She chuckled to herself. “Well, both seem to have taken Robert’s writing a bit too much to heart. I was asking that he consider the impact of his words upon our mutual friend. But perhaps,” she said, sliding her arm through my elbow, “you might be of help, as well.” 

Nelly led me off down the aviary, towards a small marble pool in which several macaws were cleaning their feathers. 

“All my life,” she said, “I’ve been surrounded by people who believed only in the essentials. Whether you could go to university or to finishing school, whether you could make art or a home, whether you belonged in one country or another or none at all. So here is my great experiment in mutability. When I was a girl, my parents kept a pair of cockatiels in this ghastly old cage, in the corner of the parlor. Whenever company came over they’d roll them out and pull off the sheet and prod them until the pair couldn’t take it anymore, and they’d start squealing out in French—vulgar stuff, whatever their captors must have barked at them on the boat over. Over the years we managed to teach them a few little German phrases, a couple scraps of Schiller, but whenever they got too anxious, out came the curses. Everyone laughed, I laughed too, but it always struck me as a little sad. My parents filled their heads with pure nonsense, and then trotted them out to show their guests that they, at least, were better than a couple of birds. But that always seemed wrong to me: because what were my parents doing than parroting the culture they’d been fed, without thought for the meaning? At least the birds didn’t know better.”

“I’m sure they gave it some thought.”

“Naturally, Peter. I began collecting these birds for my own purpose. I made sure always to have one on hand in my parlor, to bring them to my parties and my salons, to allow them to absorb as much culture and language and life, and then to pick out the most beautiful and notable phrases, and to spend the rest of their lives repeating them, on and on and on. But once a bird chooses, they’ve chosen forever, and so one bird becomes two, two four, five, ten—you see my dilemma. I could not possibly keep them all in my townhouse, crying out all night long in their cages. And what a bad influence they had on the new arrivals, forcing their fragments onto those young unformed minds. So a few years ago I built them this habitat, and only once they had moved out did I realize that this was in fact the true purpose of my act, a genuine act of curation. For cloistered out here, away from all human influence, free of all the clutter and the bustle and the bars, their words took on a life of their own. They took our language and turned it into something new, gave it an alien life. We are to be new or nothing at all. And on any given day my birds break our language apart and put it back together again, they have collaged a new meaning from something old and dusty and restrictive. Listen, and tell me you don’t disagree.”

And so we stood there a moment, a moment punctuated by flapping wings and lapping tongues and so many shrill voices that I could hardly make out a single word, let alone a new language. “It sounds a bit,” I confessed, “like a madhouse.”

“Because you don’t yet have the knack. I believe I once compared Robert to my birds, didn’t I? I really did think he was up to the same game, language for the sake of language, words without meaning, and all that. He certainly seems to think he’s convinced us all of that. But I don’t buy it anymore, and I don’t think Lene does either.”

“I don’t know what she thinks.”

“Don’t you? You heard her tonight. Take my heart in your teeth, drain my body dry. She might as well have brought him up onstage and whispered it into his ear. Vera and the secretary, speaking through their hidden book, right in front of the rest of us. It’s foolish, reckless, and neither of them will admit it.”

“I really doubt that Robert is thinking about all that.”

“Isn’t he? You have changed something for me alone, or whatever he read tonight: it took my breath away. He is calling out, and she is responding. My god, she is changing her art for him, and he’s warping it in his direction. She used to speak for herself, now she only speaks to him, in the words that she thinks he needs to hear. She needs him to act first, to say the words that will change her world. But he never will. I know men like your friend, he is afraid, he will retreat, he will keep quiet and choose himself.”

We had reached the end of the attic, and began to retrace our steps through the potted brush. 

“What about your precious mutability?” I asked. “Can’t they change their lives?”

“No, not women like Lene. Do you know what that would mean for a woman in her position? She is married, she is comfortable and stable, and I don’t think she has any idea of what awaits her outside of that world. Berlin will not be kind to a woman in her—position. Does she really expect your friend to support her, to indulge her? Does she really think his absurd little joke can make a life for one person, let alone two? She is perched on the edge, it’s miraculous she balances as well as she does, but her life would burn up in an instant, and she would be left with the ashes. She would throw her life away,” she declared, and led me back into the clearing, “out of something so stupid as love.”

~

Dinner was served down the center of the lawn, servants coming and going with course after course, until the long day dimmed and the evening tipped towards that undimming summer twilight. Nelly gave a benedictory speech in a crown of flowers, like a bride. “The architect of our evening!” she announced, drawing Katherine up beside her. I had been seated far down the table with a group of actors, a couple of critics, and a few archeology students. “I think,” I said. “I want to,” I said. “It seems to me,” I said, but they all ignored me. Down the table I could see my friends smiling in the lanternlight, and could only imagine their conversation for myself.

Following the final course I walked the long distance down the lawn towards them. I passed Nelly, a red shawl drawn up around her shoulders, as she led Lene up towards the garden by the arm. The patroness was just finishing some speech, and Lene gave one hard shake of her head and struggled against her host’s grip. “I am not,” I overheard. “I have never.”

“Oh, oh, ” Nelly replied. “But you already are.”

By the time I reached the head of the table, two very young women, still perhaps in their girlhood, had buttonholed Robert.

“We loved your piece,” said the one woman.

“It so intrigued us,” said the other.

“And we’d love to publish something of yours.”

“Something new, anything at all.”

“It would really,” they concluded, “be our honor.”

“You wouldn’t want to,” murmured nervous Robert, gripping a glass of sherry with both hands. “I’m not much of a writer.”

Lene appeared from behind me, walking fast in her short boots until she placed herself between them. “Very kind of you, ladies, really. But Robert writes for Blum Verlag, and for Neulichkeit, and he is hard at work on this novel. Considerate patrons of the arts that you are, you would not want to distract him, would you?” 

Nelly interrupted us. “We were just about to head out onto the water. So come, everyone!” she announced, and waved us on towards the lakeshore. “To the island!”

We had begun to follow along when Lene cried out. “Robert! Where is your hat?” Robert shrugged. “It’s your hat that I bought for you. If they catch you without one you’ll spoil the impression we’ve worked so hard to form.”

“It’s just a hat,” I sniped.

“That’s right, Peter,” said Lene. “So go grab it.”

“As if I know where he dropped it.”

“Well I certainly don’t. Oh please, Peter, you were with him all evening, surely you will remember. Go, now!” 

I pushed my way past the crowd and raced up through the garden. If it wasn’t at the table, and wasn’t by the stage… But then I remembered Selma, and the attic, and Robert laying his bowler upon a branch. I had only to follow her ventriloquist act and I would find the hat. I stepped in through the garden door and pressed one panel after another until the correct one gave way, revealing the hidden staircase nestled within. 

I ran from one floor to the next and emerged into the attic in a sweat. The room was as it had been, with its painted sky and false forest and yet—the aviary was silent. No bird song and no human speech, no squawking or singing. Nelly’s new language had evaporated in her absence. 

I blundered about in the half-dark, striking out left and right in search of Robert’s hat. I could have searched the room for an hour, I could have spent a week tearing every leaf from every branch, and still I would never find it. What was it but a beat-up bowler, by now undoubtedly soured with parrot droppings and chewed up by that cackling little cockatoo? 

And then, by pure chance, I broke again through the branches, and came upon lemon-white Selma nested in her gifted bowler. The bird was resting her head beneath her wing, her crest down, purring softly in her sleep. Gently, I took the hat from its branch and reached in to lift Selma back to her place. Yet no sooner had I slipped a finger beneath the brim than the bird awoke. Her black eyes snapped open and her crest leapt upward and, her face up to mine, and she began to screech: Not a writer, not a writer, not a writer. It was a warning, a condemnation, a threat that all of her fellows took up, each cackling madly its poisoned bit of human speech, an alien chorus that swelled and swelled until the whole long room filled up with their horrible sobbing voices, crying out for the original language that had been smothered in their minds and replaced with this hideous degraded impersonation. I took Selma by the talons and tossed her into the branches, and I did not stop running until I reached the shoreline.

Only to discover that the ceremonies had gone on without me. A fleet of rowboats with torches burning in their bows was pushing out across the lake. All these respectable party guests clad in their finery were sailing like pagans towards a small wooded island far out from the shore. A song drifted back across the water: Behold the burning cycle that never has an end. Not a single boat was tied to the dock, or pulled up onto the grass. They had left me behind, and they did not even know it.

I sat on the edge of the dock and took out my cigarettes, and I watched the party as they landed upon the far shore and made their way towards a tower of white wood, stacked high above their heads. The women seemed almost spectral in the long twilight, shimmering in their dresses of red and blue and green against the white horizon. Their voices crescendoed to a fevered pitch, and then they flung their torches down and the bonfire burst to life, its flames leaping up and up, high beyond the treetops, and the waves lapped against my shoes, and I could see nothing but the fire, slicing across the undying evening like a talon, like a knife. I watched it a long time, I don’t know how long, until my eyes burned and my shoes grew damp and I had smoked my cigarettes through, and even when I got up for bed their voices were still sounding faintly from across the water, singing a song whose words I still do not know.