Free Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard Page A

rest, the miller’s son said. His uncle, he said, had started raising birds about twenty years ago and lived only for those birds. He had died three weeks ago, and the birds had begun raising a terrible racket. It was driving them half crazy. At first they thought that the birds’ screeching over the death of their protector would let up after a while, or stop entirely, but they had been mistaken. It had only grown more and more unbearable. “You have to realize,” he said, “that that sort of noise sounds a hundred times louder in this gorge.” It was nothing you could get accustomed to, and you couldn’t ask a person to endure it. So yesterday their father had told them they could finish off the birds to shut them up. They had done a lot of thinking about the mode of execution, and finally had hit on the idea of not chopping off their heads like chickens, but doing it so there would be no sign of outward damage. That way they wouldn’t have to part with the birds, the miller’s son said. They’d all grown used to those marvelous birds, even though they weren’t completely daft about them the way their uncle had been. They intended to stuff the birds themselves and fill a whole room, their dead uncle’s room, with them.
    He’d had the idea of setting up a bird museum at the mill, the miller’s son said. It hadn’t been easy to get at the birds. When they started taking the first birds out and twisting their necks, the shrieking had increased, of course, but then it had gradually come to a stop. By the time they were done killing this batch, the rest had fallen totally silent.
    Now I understood why the birds had been so frightenedwhen I approached the cage, for from the very first moment I had thought that the birds were reacting unnaturally.
    Their faces were all scratched up from capturing the birds, the miller’s son said. But now, with their experience, they would be able to process the remainder much faster and more easily that evening, and by tonight they would have perfect peace.… At first his father had thought of selling the birds alive to a collector, he said, but to find such a collector would have taken too much time and in the meanwhile they would probably have gone out of their minds. It was hard to get to a taxidermist, too; that was why they wanted to stuff the birds themselves in their leisure time. His uncle, the miller’s son said, had had nothing in his head but those birds. He had left a vast number of notes about his birds; undoubtedly they’d be valuable for a bird specialist. (“We’re all fond of making notes!” the miller’s son said.) The miller’s son picked up one of the handsome birds and held it high, so that we could see it well, and described its fine points. The young man apparently knew a good deal about exotic birds, I thought. Possibly all the inhabitants of the mill had concentrated on those birds. He was able to identify them all correctly. Some, he said, came from Asiatic countries, others from the Americas, and still others from Africa. Most of them, however, were Far Eastern island birds, with not a single one from Europe, he said. His uncle had often sat in the aviary for hours, but none of the birds had ever attacked him. They all had names like Kalahari, Malemba, Mitwaba, Ching-tou, Koejijang, Amoy, Druro, Drirari, Cochabamba, Carrizal, and so on. He said he knew the most remarkable facts about birds from the hundreds of ornithology books piled up in his uncle’s room.
    But I could stand it no longer in the outbuilding wherethose dead birds lay on the board as on a bier. Above all the smell made it impossible for me to stay any longer, and I went out. I distracted the miller’s son, and thus myself, from the dead birds by starting to talk about life in the gorge. Did he know Prince Saurau? I asked. Yes, of course. Sometimes the prince unexpectedly came down into the gorge and visited the mill. He would sit down and say “incredible things.” He always