Patrick Süskind

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  THE PIGEON

  Translated by John E. Woods

  Contents

  The Pigeon

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PIGEON

  Patrick Süskind was born in 1949. He studied history in Munich and was a writer for television before writing his first novel, Perfume. The Pigeon was his second novel and was later adapted for the stage. His other works include The Double-Bass, a play which has been widely performed in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and has also appeared at the Edinburgh Festival and at the National Theatre in London; The Story of Mr Sommer, a novella published in 1992; and Three Stories and a Reflection, published in 1996.

  At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again – other than death some day. And that was perfectly all right with him. For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life.

  The majority of such events lay, thank God, far back in the dim, remote years of his childhood and youth, which he no longer had any desire whatever to recall, and when he did, then only with the greatest aversion. On a summer afternoon, in July 1942, in or near Charenton, as he was returning home from fishing – there had been a thunderstorm that day with heavy rain, after a long heat wave – on the way home he had taken off his shoes, had walked along the warm, wet asphalt with bare feet and splashed through the puddles, an indescribable delight … he had come home from fishing, then, and had run into the kitchen, expecting to find his mother there cooking, and his mother was nowhere to be seen, all that was to be seen was her apron, hanging over the back of the chair. His mother was gone, his father said, she had had to go away for a long time on a trip. They had taken her away, said the neighbours, they had taken her first to the Vélodrome d’Hiver and then out to the camp at Drancy, from there it was off to the east, and no one ever came back from there. And Jonathan comprehended nothing of this event, it had totally confused him, and then a few days later his father had vanished as well, and Jonathan and his younger sister suddenly found themselves in a train heading south, and the next thing were being led across a meadow by total strangers and then tugged through a stretch of woods and once more put on a train heading to the south, far away, farther than they could ever comprehend, and an uncle, whom they had never seen before, picked them up in Cavaillon and brought them to his farm near the village of Puget in the valley of the Durance and kept them hidden there until the end of the war. Then he put them to work in his vegetable fields.

  In the early fifties – Jonathan was beginning to take to the farmworker’s life – the uncle had demanded that he report for military duty, and Jonathan obediently signed up for three years. The first year, he had been occupied solely with getting used to the nuisances of life in a horde, in a barracks. The second year, he was shipped off to Indochina. The greatest part of the third year, he spent in hospital, recovering from a shot in the foot and one in the leg and from amoebic dysentery. When he returned to Puget in the spring of 1954, his sister had vanished, had emigrated to Canada, people said. The uncle now demanded that Jonathan wed post-haste, and that it be a girl named Marie Baccouche from the neighbouring village of Lauris; and Jonathan, who had never seen the girl before, stoutly did as he was told, indeed did it gladly, for although he had only an imperfect notion of married life, he nevertheless hoped that he would finally find himself in a state of monotone serenity and uneventfulness, the only state, in fact, for which he longed. But within a mere four months, Marie gave birth to a boy, and that same autumn bolted with a Tunisian fruit merchant from Marseille.

  Drawing on all these episodes, Jonathan Noel came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm’s length. And because he had now also become the laughing-stock of the village – which disturbed him not because of the laughter, but because of the public attention he was attracting – for the first time in his life he made a decision on his own: he went to the Crédit Agricole, withdrew his savings, packed his bag, and headed for Paris.

  Then he had a double stroke of luck. He found work as a guard at a bank in the rue de Sèvres, and he found lodgings, a so-called chambre de bonne on the seventh floor of a building in the rue de la Planche. You got to the room by way of a back courtyard, the narrow service stairway, and a cramped hallway sparely lit by one window. Two dozen small rooms, each numbered in grey paint, lay along this hallway, and at the far end was number 24, Jonathan’s room. It measured eleven feet two inches by seven feet three inches in width and was eight feet two inches high, and its sole conveniences were a bed, a table, a chair, a light bulb, and a clothes hook, nothing more. Not until the sixties did rewiring make it possible to plug in a hot plate and an electric fire, and the plumbing was also redone to provide the room with its own basin and hot-water heater. Until then, all the residents of the garret had eaten their meals cold – that is, if they didn’t use an outlawed alcohol burner – slept in cold rooms, and washed their socks, their few dishes, and themselves with cold water in a single basin out in the hall, right next to the door of the shared toilet. All of which did not bother Jonathan. He was not looking for comfort, but for secure lodgings that belonged to him and him alone, that protected him against life’s unpleasant surprises and from which no one could ever drive him away again. And upon entering room number 24 for the first time, he had known at once: this is it, this is what you’ve really always wanted, this is where you’ll stay. (Just the way it happens to other people, or so they say, with so-called love at first sight, when in a flash someone realises that some woman he has never seen before is the woman of his life, that he will possess her and remain with her until the end of his days.)

  Jonathan Noel rented this room for five thousand old francs a month, left it every morning to go to work in the nearby rue de Sèvres, returned in the evening with bread, charcuterie, apples, and cheese, ate, slept, and was happy. On Sunday he did not leave the room at all, but cleaned it instead and put fresh sheets on his bed. And so he lived, in peace and contentment, year in, year out, decade after decade.

  Certain extraneous matters changed during this time – the amount of rent, for instance, the kinds of tenants. In the fifties, a good many servant girls had lived in the other rooms and young married couples and a few pensioners. Later on, you often saw Spaniards, Portuguese, North Africans moving in and out. From the end of the sixties on, students predominated. Finally, not all twenty-four rooms were rented any more. Many stood empty or were used for storage or occasionally for guests of residents who lived in the elegant apartments below. Over the years, Jonathan’s number 24 had become a comfortable dwelling, comparatively speaking. He had bought himself a new bed, fashioned a built-in cupboard, laid a grey carpet over the room’s eighty-one square feet, done the alcove for cooking and washing in beautiful red oilskin wallpaper. He owned a radio, a television set, and an iron. He no longer hung his provisions out of the window in bags as before, but instead kept them in a tiny refrigerator under the wash-basin, so that now his butter did not melt nor his ham dry out, even during the hottest summer. At the head of his bed he had erected a bookcase, in which stood no fewer than seventeen books, viz. a medical pocket dictionary in three volumes, several lovely illustrated books on Cro-Magnon man, the art of Bronze Age casting, the ancient Egyptians, the Etruscans, and the French Revolution, a book on sailing ships, one on flags, one on the fauna of the tropics, two novels by Alexandre Dumas père, the memoirs of Saint-Simon, a casserole cook-book, the Petit Larousse, and the Handbook for Security and Guard Personnel with Special Reference to Regulations concerning the Use of the Service Pistol Under his bed were stored a dozen bottles of red wine, among them a bottle of Château Cheval-Blanc grand cru classé, which he was saving for retirement day in 1998. An ingenious system of lighting allowed Jonathan to sit and read his newspaper in three different places in the room – that is, at the foot and head of his bed as well as at the table – without ever being blinded and with never a shadow falling on the paper.

  As a result of all these many acquisitions, the room had of course become smaller still, growing inwardly, as it were, like an oyster encrusted with mother-of-pearl, and in its diverse sophisticated installations resembled more a ship’s cabin or a luxurious Pullman compartment than a simple chambre de bonne. But its essential character had been maintained down through those thirty years: it was and would remain Jonathan’s island of security in a world of insecurity, his refuge, his beloved – yes, for she received him with a tender embrace each evening when he returned home, she offered warmth and protection, she nourished both body and soul, was always there when he needed her and did not desert him. She was in point of fact the only thing that had proved dependable in his life. And therefore he had never for a moment thought of leaving her, not even now, though he was already over fifty and occasionally found it an effort to climb so many stairs, and though his salary would have allowed him to rent a regular apartment with its own kitchen, its own toilet and bath. He remained true to his beloved, was even in the process of strengthening his bonds to her, and hers to him. He wanted to make their relationship inviolable for all time by buying her. He had already signed a contract with Madame Lassalle, the owner. It was to cost him fifty-five thousand new francs. He had al ready paid forty-seven thousand. The remaining eight thousand were due at the end of the year. And then she would finally be his and nothing in the world would ever be able to separate them – him, Jonathan, and his beloved room – one from the other, until death did them part.

  That was the state of things when, in August 1984, on a Friday morning, the affair with the pigeon occurred.

  Jonathan had just got up. As he did every morning, he had put on his slippers and dressing-gown so that he could visit the shared toilet before shaving. Prior to opening the door, he laid an ear to its panel and listened to hear if anyone was in the hall. He did not relish meeting his fellow tenants, particularly not in the morning in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and least of all on the way to the toilet. Finding the toilet occupied would have been unpleasant enough; but the idea of meeting another tenant at the door of the toilet was nothing short of a nightmare of embarrassment. It had happened to him just one single time, in the summer of 1959, twenty-five years before, and he shuddered to think back on it: the simultaneous shock of each at the sight of the other, the simultaneous loss of anonymity while on a mission demanding absolute anonymity, the simultaneous shrinking back and re-advancing, the simultaneous reeling off of courtesies: please, after you, oh no, after you, monsieur, I’m in no hurry at all, no, you first, I insist – and all of it in pyjamas! No, he never wanted to experience it again, nor had he experienced it again, thanks to his prophylactic ear-to-the-door. By listening, he could see through the door out into the hallway. He knew every noise on the floor. He could interpret every crack, every click, every soft ripple or rustle, the very silence itself. And he knew – now, with his ear to the door for only a couple of seconds – he was quite sure that no one was in the hall, that the toilet was unoccupied, that everyone was still asleep. With his left hand he turned the knob of the security lock, with his right the knob of the spring lock, the bolt slipped back, he pulled with a soft jerk, and the door swung open.

  He had almost set foot across the threshold, had already raised the foot, his left, his leg was in the act of stepping – when he saw it. It was sitting before his door, not eight inches from the threshold, in the pale reflection of dawn that came through the window. It was crouched there, with red, taloned feet on the oxblood tiles of the hall and in sleek, blue-grey plumage: the pigeon.

  It had laid its head to one side and was glaring at Jonathan with its left eye. This eye, a small, circular disc, brown with a black centre, was dreadful to behold. It was like a button sewn on to the feathers of the head, lashless, browless, quite naked, turned quite shamelessly to the world and monstrously open; at the same time, however, there was something guarded and devious in that eye; and yet likewise it seemed to be neither open nor guarded, but rather quite simply lifeless, like the lens of a camera that swallows all external light and allows nothing to shine back out of its interior. No lustre, no shimmer lay in that eye, not a sparkle of anything alive. It was an eye without sight. And it glared at Jonathan.

  He was frightened to death – that was probably how he would have described the moment later on, but that would not have been correct, because the fear came only later. He was, rather, amazed to death.

  Perhaps for five, perhaps for ten seconds – to him it seemed like for ever – he stood there at the threshold of his door as if frozen, hand on the knob, foot lifted for stepping out, and could move neither forward nor backward. Then some small movement occurred. It might have been that the pigeon shifted its weight from one foot to the other, that it just ruffled itself a little – at any rate, a brief jolt went through its body, and at the same time the two lids snapped together over its eye, one from below, one from above, not real lids either, more like some kind of rubbery flaps that swallowed up the eye like two lips emerging from nowhere. For a moment it vanished. And only now did fear jerk its way through Jonathan, his hair standing on end from pure terror. With a single bound he leaped back into his room and slammed the door, before the pigeon’s eye had re-opened. He turned the security lock, staggered the three steps to the bed, sat down trembling, his heart pounding wildly. His brow was ice cold, and from his nape all the way down his spine, he could feel sweat breaking out.

  His first thought was that he would suffer a heart attack or a stroke or at least black out; he was at the right age for all that, he thought, from fifty on it takes only the least little thing to cause such a mishap. And he let himself fall to one side on the bed and pulled the blanket up over his chilled shoulders and waited for the spasms of pain, for the stab in the area of breast and shoulders (he had once read in his medical pocket dictionary that these were the infallible symptoms of a heart attack) or for the slow waning of consciousness. But nothing of the sort happened. The beat of his heart quieted, his blood flowed again regularly through head and limbs, and signs of paralysis, so typical of a stroke, did not appear. Jonathan could move toes and fingers and distort his face with grimaces, a sign that everything was more or less in order, organically and neurologically speaking.

  Instead, a riotous mass of the most random terrors whirled about in his brain like a swarm of black ravens, and in his head was a screaming and a fluttering, and it croaked, “You’ve had it! You’re too old and you’ve had it, letting yourself be frightened to death by a pigeon, letting a pigeon drive you back into your room, knock you down, hold you prisoner. You will die, Jonathan, you’ll die, if not right away, then soon, and your whole life has been a lie, you’ve made a mess of it, because it’s been upended by a pigeon, you must kill it, but you can’t kill it, you can’t kill a fly, or wait, a fly, yes, a fly you can manage or a mosquito or a little bug, but never something warm-blooded, some warm-blooded creature like a pigeon that weighs a pound, you’d gun down a human being first, bang bang, that’s fast, just makes a little hole, a quarter of an inch thick, that’s clean and it’s permissible, in self-defence it’s permissible, article one in the regulations for armed security personnel, it’s required, in fact, not a soul blames you if you shoot down a person, just the opposite, but a pigeon?, how do you shoot down a pigeon?, it flutters around, a pigeon does, so that you can easily miss, it’s a gross misdemeanour to shoot at a pigeon, it’s forbidden, that leads to confiscation of your service weapon, to loss of your job, you end up in prison if you shoot at a pigeon, no, you can’t kill it, but you can’t live, live with it either, never, no human being can go on living in the same house with a pigeon, a pigeon is the epitome of chaos and anarchy, a pigeon that whizzes around unpredictably, that sets its claws in you, picks at your eyes, a pigeon that never stops soiling and spreading the filth and havoc of bacteria and meningitis virus, that doesn’t just stay alone, one pigeon lures other pigeons, that leads to sexual intercourse and they breed at a frantic pace, a host of pigeons will lay siege, you won’t be able to leave your room ever again, will have to starve, will suffocate in your excrement, will have to throw yourself out of the window and lie there smashed on the pavement, no, you’re too much of a coward, you’ll stay locked up in your room and scream for help, you’ll scream for the fire brigade, for them to come with ladders and rescue you from a pigeon, from a pigeon!, you’ll be the laughing-stock of the building, the laughing-stock of the whole neighbourhood, ‘look, Monsieur Noel!’ they’ll shout, and point their fingers at you, ‘look, Monsieur Noel has to be rescued from a pigeon!’ and they’ll admit you to a psychiatric clinic: oh Jonathan, Jonathan, your situation is hopeless, you’re a lost man, Jonathan!”

  Such were the screamings and croakings in his head, and Jonathan was so bewildered and desperate that he did something that he had not done since childhood days – that is, in his agony he folded his hands to pray, and he prayed, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why dost thou punish me so? Our Father, who art in heaven, save me from this pigeon, amen!” This was, as we can see, no orderly prayer; what he offered up was more like the stammered, patchwork fragments of something recalled from a rudimentary religious education. But it helped nevertheless, for it demanded a certain measure of concentration of the mind and so banished the tangle of his thoughts. Something else helped him still more. He had hardly spoken his prayer to its end when he sensed such an urgent need to piss that he knew he would befoul the bed he was lying on, the lovely coil-spring mattress, or even his lovely grey carpet, if he did not succeed in finding relief somewhere within the next few seconds. This brought him totally to himself. Groaning, he stood up, cast a desperate glance at the door – no, he could not walk through that door, even if the damned bird were gone now, he would no longer make it to the toilet – walked over to the basin, ripped open his dressing-gown, ripped down his pyjama bottoms, turned on the tap, and pissed into the basin.

 

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