The Final Solution: A Story of Detection

retrospectively and certainly since losing Linus, as the sense and fulfillment of his long life's pointless wan­ derings.

'There is no fucking prefix,' Kalb said. He lowered the sheet of blue paper and fixed his madman's gaze on Bruno. Bruno set his head to an angle that, among his own kind, would have been understood as an eloquent expression of sardonic intransigence, and waited.

'How about some letters, for a change?' the man said. 'Don't you know any letters?'

Letters was in fact a concept that he grasped, or at any rate one that he recognized; it was the name of the bright bundles of paper that men ripped open so ravenously and watched so hopelessly with their darting white eyes.

'Alphabet?' Kalb tried. 'A-B-C?'

Bruno held his head steady, but his pulse quickened at the sound. He was fond of alphabets; they were intensely pleasurable to sing. He remembered Linus singing his al­phabet, in the tiny errant voice of his first vocalizations. The memory was poignant, and the urge to repeat his ABC bub­bled and rose in Bruno until it nearly overwhelmed him, un­til his claws ached for the give of the boy's slim shoulder. But he remained silent. The man blinked, breathing steadily, angrily, through his soft pale beak.

'Come on,' he said. He bared his teeth. 'Please. Please.'

The alphabet song swelled and billowed, distending Bruno's breast. As was true of all his kind there was a raw place somewhere, inside him, that singing pressed against in a way that felt very good. If he sang the alphabet song for the man, the rawness would diminish. If he sang the train song, which had lingered far longer and more vividly in his mind than any of the thousand other songs he could sing, for rea­sons unclear even to him but having to do with sadness, with the sadness of his captivity, of his wanderings, of his finding the boy, of the rolling trains, of the boy's mama and papa and the mad silence that had come over the boy when he was ban­ished from them, then the rawness would be soothed. It was bliss to sing the train song. But the alphabet song would do.

He could just sing a little of it; just the beginning. Surely that could be of no possible value to the man. He shined his star­ing left eye at Kalb, fighting him as he had been fighting him for weeks.

'There is no fucking prefix,' Bruno said.

The man let out a sharp soft whistle of breath, and raised his hand as if to strike the bird. Bruno had been struck before, several times over the years. He had been throttled and shaken and kicked. There were certain songs that provoked such responses in certain people, and one learned to avoid them, or in the case of a very clever bird like Bruno, to choose one's moments. It had been possible to torment le Colonel, for example, simply through the judi­cious repetition, in the presence of his wife, of certain choice remarks of le Colonel's petite amie Mile. Arnaud.

He raised one claw to ward off the blow. He prepared to snatch a moist chunk of flesh from the man's hand. But in­stead of hitting him the man turned away, and went to lie down on the bed. This was a welcome development; for if the man fell asleep, then Bruno could permit himself to sing the alphabet song, and also the train song, which he sang, of course, in the boy's secret voice, just as the boy had sung it to him, standing in the window at the back of Herr Ober-gruppenfuhrer's house, overlooking the railroad tracks, watching the endless trains rolling off to the place where the sun came up out of the ground every day, each piece of the train bearing the special claw marks that were the interminable lyrics of the train song. Because Kalb seemed to want so badly to hear the train song, Bruno was careful now only to sing it when the man was asleep, with the instinctive and deliberate perversity that was among the virtues most highly prized by his kind. The sound of the train song, aris­ ing in the middle of the night, would jar the man from his slumber, send him scrabbling for his pencil and pad. When at last he was awake, sitting in a circle of light from the lamp with pencil clutched in his fingers, then-of course- Bruno would leave off singing. Night after night, this performance was repeated. Bruno had seen men driven mad, beginning with that Dutchman on the island of Ferdinand Po, in the heat, with the endless humming of the cicadas. He knew how it was done.

The doorbell rang, far below Kalb's cramped room. Bruno heard it, and then, an instant later as always, the man heard it, too. He sat up, his head cocked at an angle that among parrots would have signified mild sexual arousal but that among apes denoted vigilance. Kalb was always alert to the comings and goings of the house, in which seventeen other humans, six of them female, dwelled, in separate quarters, only rarely exchanging their songs. Bruno could hear nine of the other humans now, heard their wireless sets, their coal hissing in the grate, the clack of a pair of knitting needles. And he could hear the voice of Mrs. Dunn, the landlady, far down at the bottom of the stairs. In reply came a male voice that he didn't recognize. Then Bruno heard heavy treads on the stairway, three, no, four men, and Mrs. Dunn as well, but Kalb appeared not to remark this clamor until the climbers were well past the second-storey landing and still coming up.

At last Kalb flew to his feet and ran to press his ear to the door. He listened for a moment, then uttered a dark, harsh syllable much favored by Herr Obergruppenfuhrer when he had lain on Papa's couch, in the office at the back of the house by the railroad tracks, a stench on his boots that was almost as terrible as the smell of the Dutchman's glass of death. Kalb spun from the door and cast his eyes wildly around the room, then turned to Bruno, his arms outspread, as though asking for assistance. But Bruno felt no inclina­tion to help him, for Kalb was not at all a good man. He had taken Bruno from Linus, who needed Bruno and sang to him in a way that deeply repaid all the long years of suffer­ing and captivity; and, what was more, Kalb was a killer of his fellow men-Bruno had seen him strike down the man called Mr. Shane, from behind, with a hammer. It was true, of course, that Mr. Shane had also been planning to take Bruno from Linus; nonetheless Bruno would never have de­sired his death, and hated the ineradicable memory of hav­ing witnessed it.

He determined to inform Kalb that he would not help him, even if somehow he could have done so, even if he un­derstood what danger it was that now approached.

He opened his beak and emitted, in a way that pressed very satisfyingly on the raw place inside him, a series of low chuckling coughs. This allusion to Kalb's characteristic odor, though the man would have had no way of knowing it, constituted a faithful and exact reproduction of the sound produced by the Blue Minorcans that had scratched in the back garden of le Colonel's house in Biskra, Algeria, in particular of one strapping blue and white lady whose col­oration Bruno had always admired.

The next moment he paid rather dearly for his little joke, however, when the man snatched up a canvas laundry sack and dived at Bruno, grasping him unfairly but effectively by the legs. Before Bruno could get hold of Kalb's hand or nose or earlobe with the mighty implement, horn and shears and mouth and hand, that was his sole pride and vanity and treasure in the world, he found himself thrust into darkness.

From within the laundry sack he heard the sound of the man gathering up his scattered sheets of claw marks, and then the creak of the wardrobe door. The darkness around him resounded with an unmistakably wooden vibration and he understood from this that he was going to be put inside the wardrobe. He felt his head strike against something and then there was a flash in his skull, vivid as the breast feath­ers of that long-since-eaten Blue Minorcan chicken. Next a clatter, as his perch itself tumbled in alongside, jostling him; a soft splash of water from the little tin dish attached to the crossbar. Then another creak as Kalb closed the wardrobe, sealing Bruno up.

Bruno lay perfectly still, paralyzed by darkness and the light that had burst in his skull. When the knock sounded at the door he tried to sing out but found that he could not move his tongue.

'Mr. Kalb?' It was Mrs. Dunn. 'The police are here. They want to speak to you.'

'Yes, all right.'

There was the sound of the tap running, the chiming of the shaving brush against the cup. And then the clatter of the lock on the door.

'Mr. Martin Kalb?'

'That's right. Has something happened?'

There followed a brief murmured exchange of song be­tween the men, one to which Bruno paid little attention. He was badly disoriented, and the effects of the man's brutality toward him lingered, ringing in his cranium. This disturbed him, for it seemed to demand to be echoed, repeated-it called for retribution-and yet violence was as foreign to him as silence itself.

'So you have no idea what could have become then of the boy's parrot?' he heard one of the men saying. He