“You must not be able to tell time,” said the Portuguese. “The day isn’t over yet. Don’t stand there and make a fool out of yourself.”
“You’re looking at me as angrily as those two bad eyes did when I fell down here into the yard.”
“The impertinence!” said the Portuguese. “Comparing me with a cat—that carnivore! I who don’t have a mean bone in my body! I’ve taken good care of you, and now I’m going to teach you a lesson.”
And then she bit the head off the songbird, and he lay there dead.
“What’s this?” she said, “Couldn’t he take that? Well, then he really wasn’t meant for this world. I know I’ve been like a mother to him. It’s because of my good heart!”
The neighbor’s rooster stuck his head into the duckyard and crowed powerfully.
“You’ll be the death of someone with that crowing,” said the duck. “It’s all your fault. He lost his head, and I am close to losing mine.
“He doesn’t look very impressive lying there,” said the rooster.
“Speak of him with respect!” said the Portuguese. “He had a beautiful tone and song and was highly cultured. He was loving and sensitive, as is fitting for all animals as well as for so-called human beings.”
And all the ducks gathered around the little dead songbird. Ducks have strong feelings, either with envy or with pity, and since they didn’t envy the songbird, they pitied him. So did the two Chinese hens.
“There’ll never be another songbird like him! He was almost Chinese,” and they cried so they gurgled, and all the hens clucked, but the ducks had the reddest eyes.
“We have heart,” they said. “Nobody can deny that.”
“Heart!” said the Portuguese. “Indeed, we have! We have nearly as much as they have in Portugal!”
“Now let’s think about getting something to eat,” said the drake. “That’s more important. If one musician’s voice is stilled, there are still plenty more, after all.”
NOTE
1 A wordplay on the Danish informal form of address that does not appear in the original. In Danish, “you” can be spoken or written either formally (using the word
THE STORKS
ON THE LAST HOUSE in a little town there was a stork’s nest. The stork mother sat in the nest with her four little children, who stuck their heads out with their little black beaks that hadn’t turned red yet. A little distance away on the top of the roof, stork father was standing straight and stiff. He had pulled one leg up under him in order to take a few pains while he was standing sentry. You would think he was carved from wood, that’s how still he stood. “It must look pretty impressive that my wife has a sentry by the nest,” he thought. “They can’t know I’m her husband. They probably think I’ve been commanded to stand here. It looks very impressive!” and he continued to stand on one leg.
Down on the street a whole gang of children were playing, and when they saw the storks, first the boldest boy and then the others sang the old ditty about the storks, but they sang it the way they remembered it:
“Listen to what the boys are singing,” the little storks said. “They say we’ll be hanged and burned!”
“Don’t pay any attention to that,” said the stork mother. “Just don’t listen, and it won’t matter.”
But the boys kept singing, and they pointed at the storks. Only one boy, whose name was Peter, said that it wasn’t nice to make fun of the animals and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. The stork mother consoled her children. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, “Just see how calmly your father is standing there and on one leg too!”
“We’re so scared,” said the little storks, and drew their heads way down into the nest.
The next day when the children gathered again to play, they saw the storks and started their song:
“Are we going to be hanged and burned?” asked the stork babies.
“No, certainly not,” their mother answered. “You’re going to learn to fly. I’ll train you. Then we’ll fly out to the meadow and visit the frogs. They’ll bow down to us in the water, and say ”croak, croak,” and then we’ll eat them up. It’ll be lots of fun.”
“And then what?” asked the little storks.
“Then all the storks in the country gather together, and we have fall maneuvers. You have to be able to fly well by then. It’s very important because those who can’t fly are stabbed to death by the General’s beak. So be very sure to learn your lessons when the training starts!”
“So we’ll be killed then anyway like the boys said, and listen: they’re singing it again.”
“Listen to me and not to them,” stork mother said. “After the big maneuvers we’ll fly to the warm countries. Oh far, far from here, over mountains and forests. We’ll fly to Egypt where they have three-sided stone houses that end in a point up over the clouds. They are called pyramids and they are older than any stork can imagine. There’s a river there that overflows so that the land becomes muddy. You walk in the mud and eat frogs.”
