Zsolt Láng
A Transylvanian Bestiary
Birds of the Air
Excerpts from the novel
[...]
Count Boldizsár loved venturing into foreign lands and, mixing with seafarers, had even travelled overseas, but whilst he was away his relatives moved into his castles, pillaged his cellars and closets, stuffed their bellies with his droves and herds, scraped the bottoms off his plates and dishes. His steward, whose job it should have been to conserve and multiply the goods and chattels entrusted to his care, colluded with the relatives (two layabout brothers-in-law) and led the way in the pillaging, putting the count's property at the mercy of his own and the relatives' rapacity, covetousness and villainy.
Of course, Count Boldizsár had no need to look to his neighbours for a bit of knavery, malice or slyness, for he was a thoroughgoing scoundrel himself, a swindler slippery as an eel, whose repertoire of chicanery had been considerably expanded in the course of his long peregrinations. A nice little family!
How might he shift the winds from the unfavourable quarter from which they were now blowing?
He had one strange little chap, a talking bird acquired on his travels at a bazaar, a human-headed parrot. The deuced creature had barely grown two spans in height, so that virtually its entire length was taken up by a full-sized man's face. From a distance he looked like a waddling human head, especially when he shuffled across the courtyard to visit the hen coops. Then anybody might have supposed he was some kind of wood elf, hobgoblin or bloated domestic dwarf. He grimaced expressively with his human features as if he had genuine feelings; in the place of a beak gaped a regular human mouth, whilst in the mouth were rows of teeth (and when he talked a lot a rancid mouth-odour enveloped him), notwithstanding which his body was covered with conventional feathers (with pungent reminiscences of his escapades amongst the hens), and it was underpinned and carried by two bona fide bird legs. He was partial to hens; nothing pleased him more than to amuse himself all day long in their company. By imitating the hissing of a snake, he had managed to reduce the cockerel, that vain and stupid princeling, to a quivering wreck in under two days, after which he had taken over the rule of the roost, covering the hens and eating up the corn before them.
For all that he was a lazy creature, he could learn anything with ease; he knew long passages from the Bible by heart and could spout them fluently. Many priests envied his superb memory, no less the ingenious rhetoric with which he delivered his commentaries; nor did those exegeses lack intellect, or indeed the noble tendentiousness of morality, in the view of more cultivated minds.
People came from far and wide to see and listen to him. A golden ducat had to be plunked down first, but then the count would already have flung open the door to the parrot's separate quarters. There were no other furnishings in the room apart from an armchair and a table, and upon the table an open-doored cage, woven from white canes of osier, and inside that-the bird. The visitor would sit down then ask something, whilst the bird would respond with a will. Neither the past nor the future was a mystery to him. His sentences avoided quibbling or vague generalisation; they were so explicit that even a half-wit could understand what had to be done or what could be reckoned on.
The rumours of his soothsaying prowess brought one client after another to the door, whilst Count Boldizsár was as happy as a huckster. His relatives ate their hearts out afresh, racking their brains over how they might lay hands on the new asset, the bountiful cornucopia that could be emptied in revelries without the least scrap of effort.
Yet nobody thought to ask the bird about when the flow of golden ducats would leave off.
* * *
False prophets can easily arise in the midst of a people that buries itself in self-lacerating moping, especially if that people is characterised by as much superstitious belief and childish credulity as the Székelys.
We never had a king of our own, they started to say. Then they hit upon one such who, laughable as he was, nobody laughed about.
They convoked an assembly, the gist of which was that the Székely nation, by the grace of God, elected the human-headed creature as its king. For them to flee their abject and sorry plight by going over to some king or another, to someone who might have a human form but in whom dwelt the soul of a wolf-that had happened before. But from this day on they would entertain no presumptuous hopes: the castle of Székelyrises was being built; there would be no Székelyruesit.
They picked those who were best cut out for the task of fetching the bird that knew the secrets of the future, having first liberated him from shameful bondage. Did that sound like a bird? No, not a bird, but a heavenly apparition, whom they had appointed twice over. Nonnisi mutato habitu-Fine feathers make fine birds, indeed. It was no chance that his face reminded them of their apostle: had he not foretold their early release from this earthly purgatory; and the fact that he had wings was also a sign of heavenly grace. To delay action after that was tantamount to infidelity. They even had a crown, one they had received from Byzantium, what is more, and kept hidden as a holy relic down the centuries.
The stately procession got under way. The steeds too were the handsomest creatures, fully a match for the equestrian stone figure on the hillside at Zsombok; the horsemen-the shapeliest Székely youths, chests swollen with pride, as though they had already successfully completed their mission. They passed under arches decked out with flowers, girls on tiptoe offered goblets of wine, the sun shone, spring foliage glistened on the tree boughs, the air was clear, the distant mountain peaks, still capped with snow, stood out sharply. Fortune was also on their side, because a chatterbox of a woman had already blabbed out where they might easily find the bird. Yet they became so immersed in the celebration that, in the end, they were left empty-handed. When they came to their senses from their inebriation and grasped their situation, they burst into tears, each and every one: so much for the king, so much for glory. They wandered round in a daze for a while longer, clueless as to which track they should follow, whom they might ask. They did not even dare look one another in the eye but just ambled along in silence, entrusting themselves to their horses. It is told that they went into hiding amongst the Turks, but in truth, crossing paths with the vagrant Tartar horde, perhaps deliberately seeking an end, they found death from the blades of swords that know no mercy.
It had been a Friday when Sapré reached István, and the Sunday when the lords who had gathered for the bison hunt murdered Kótai. And it was Friday again when István entered Gyulafehérvár.
The Andalusian beaker, in which wine turns to honey, though the honey is poison, a lethal potion with no antidote, revealed its provenance and its occult properties only half a hundred off three centuries later. The real criminal misled everybody; he was the instigator of events, he pulled all the strings. Not once did the new Prince, Count István, notice what strings were being jerked left, right and centre. What a busy puppet! After having George Vidrányi and the other rebels executed on Szatmár's main square, he set off a search for the architect of the plot, head of the rebellion, the ringleader, Count Balthazar. Balthazar, minion of the Roman Emperor of the Germans. Who might he be? He supposed that Balthazar, in the Magyar tongue, was Boldizsár...
One morning, as Count Boldizsár was stretching himself, having just woken from his sleep, the human-headed bird waddled in (he almost never used his wings) and hopped up on the bed. For once it was he who asked the question first:
'Have you heard that your head will be cut off soon?'
'Who would do that?'
'That hard-of-hearing and so gullible lord, István-who, in his foolish naiveté, will see black as white, if others say so-now considers he has found the leader of the rebellion in you. There is only one count around here called Boldizsár. The Walloon infantrymen will be coming for you the day after tomorrow.
Hitherto Boldizsár had sought out his bird on just a single question: where he might find a fortune, and how he should multiply it. Even now nothing else interested him, yet the damned bird kept prattling on incessantly about blood and executions, lopped-off heads and a girl who was also bleeding. He had had enough of it.
He locked it in its cage then packed it off with one of his young fellows to Fehérvár, to appear before the new prince, saying that maybe he would be more interested in what that philandering devil of a wise-owl was blathering on about.
Before setting out on the long journey, the young envoy paid a visit on his intended, thinking to bid her farewell. He spent the night with her, and as they were parting he blurted out the nature of the consignment he was travelling with. The next day, the maiden, who was keeping more than one iron in the fire, blabbed on to the stalwarts who buckled her bed what she had heard that night. The stalwarts carried the news to their brothers-in-law, and the brothers-in-law immediately galloped off after the bird. They lay in wait for the envoy at the edge of a forest, gave him a sound beating around the head with their maces, and were soon trotting back with the canvas-covered cage. They thought the bird, the most prolific gold mine in the country, was now in their hands. But the snow-white cage was empty.
Count Boldizsár had extricated himself from innumerable tricky situations, but this time he completely lost his composure and became so bereft of his wits that, to the very end, he kept on reiterating the same confused story about a double who had carried out everything of which he was suspected; a parrot who knew about this, and had very likely played an active part in the machinations, since he was the devil's brood, there was no disputing it; so that the one they should be submitting to the axe here could only be the parrot; it ought to be produced, even if only from under the ground. The hard-of-hearing Prince could make little sense of this farrago, which would anyway have overstepped the bounds of his patience. Only one person would have been able to penetrate his deafness, but he stayed in the background. The Prince, left to his own devices, superstitiously rejoiced that here, at last, was somebody whom he could have beheaded without compunction. Until now he had vainly tried to cure the twinges of conscience that he felt on account of the Vidrányis with a tea made from the florescence of the castor-oil plant; the cure seemed merely to rekindle the pangs and, what is more, he was continually having to urinate. Perhaps his internal problems would now subside! Death to the evil, power-crazed maniac! Death to the country's foe, death to the scheming Count Balthazar!
[...]
Zsolt Láng
(b. 1943) is a native of Transylvania, Romania. He works as an editor of the Hungarian
literary journal Látó at Marosvásárhely (Tîrgu Mureş). His books include four volumes
of fiction and a collection of essays. For details on A Transylvanian Bestiary, see the
translator Tim Wilkinson's review on p. 113.
