IGMS Issue 44 (13 page)

The two lions looked at us for an instant, and then slipped off into the darkness.

That was the first crack, but I had forgotten about it before the crow started speaking. I think I made myself forget, though it had not been hard. Sometimes things happen that don't have any connection to the rest of your life, and that's not how the human mind works. Your mind works by making connections. When it can't make one -- when a fact can't be grafted into the network of experience that makes up our mind or memory -- sometimes it just gets dropped.

That's what I did. Carla never said anything about it. I walked her home that night like nothing out of the ordinary happened, though she did hold my hand. When I passed the library after that, I did not glance at the empty pedestals. The newspaper ran a story about the theft. No one had seen anything.

It didn't make sense, so I ignored it.

The crow was more difficult to ignore.

When he started talking, the first word he said was "Dresden."

I was walking home from campus, and he had taken his customary spot on my shoulder. We would walk like this, and sometimes kids from the elementary school who were getting off the bus along my route would want to stop and try to pet him and ask me how I caught him. I would explain that he didn't like to be petted and that I hadn't caught him. He would eye them patiently and sometime give the kids an obligatory caw, which always thrilled.

The day Hamilton started talking, one of the kids, who must have been about seven or eight, walked alongside us for a block chattering about things he had read in a book on crows and ravens. He asked me if mine talked.

I told him it did not.

"Ravens are real smart," he said, oblivious to the fact that Hamilton was not a raven. "You're supposed to be able to teach them how to talk. Say something, Hammy. Say,
pretty bird
."

"Dresden," Hamilton said.

The boy clapped and smiled.

A few blocks later, having left the kids behind, Hamilton said it again.

When the kids weren't following us home from school a bunch of other crows might, and Hamilton would keep up a running conversation with them from my shoulder. But those were crow-noises. They weren't words like "Dresden."

Plus, each time he said it, it was clearer.

The third time, I finally bit.

"Okay. What about Dresden?"

He cocked his head at me but didn't say anything else. When we stopped at the station to see Carla I tried to show off his new trick, but he wouldn't perform.

The next morning he was more talkative. I had begun keeping the screen off the window in the living room so he could come and go freely. I don't know where he went at night, but in the mornings I would fix myself some oatmeal and set some raisins out on the table for him, and within a few minutes he'd fly in and hop onto the back of a chair.

"The Russians," he said, proudly, as if he'd been practicing. "Dresden."

I pointed out that Dresden was in Germany.

He talked like a crow: harsh and loud, heavy on the r's and the vowels, having trouble with his s's and n's.

I was not sure why I took it as such a matter of course that my adopted crow would first of all begin to speak, and second of all try to explain something to me about Dresden. It seemed like there were only a few options: ignore it, imagine I was going crazy, or take it in stride. The first had worked with the lions, but Hamilton was louder and wouldn't leave me alone. The second really served no purpose.

"Dresden," he said again, bobbing his head in what I took to be agreement. "The Russians."

"The Germans," I insisted. "Eat your raisins."

He muttered something I could not understand and hopped down to the table.

But it got me thinking. I knew enough to know that the Russians had cause to be in a lot of German cities at the end of the Second World War. I did not know enough geography though to know whether Dresden was in the east or the west, and I didn't know enough history to know why it was important.

He finished his raisins and muttered the word I couldn't understand, louder this time. He kept repeating it as I gathered my things and headed out the door. I didn't bike anymore now that I had a crow riding my shoulder each morning.

"You've got to practice more," I told him. "I can't understand what you're saying."

When we passed the kids coming home from school the next day, the same kid as before wanted to know if Hamilton could talk yet.

"Pretty bird," the crow said, and then, when the kid's jaw dropped, "Leave me alone."

He wouldn't stop chattering about Dresden. "Carla, Carla," he croaked as we walked up to the gas station. Again though, once we were there he would not show off. I asked Carla about Dresden.

"Like, have I been there?" She shook her head.

"Neither have I. But do you know anything about it?"

"Not really." She paused. "They had a museum exhibit a while back that was supposed to be a bunch of art and stuff from there. Dan and I went. I guess Dresden was the art capital of Germany or something before the war. They called it the Paris of Germany."

Hamilton croaked.

"What happened with the Russians?"

She shrugged.

The Russians were coming from the east, and the people of Dresden didn't want their art and sculpture -- what remained after the firebombing -- carried off or destroyed. Carla was right, and the city had been called "the Paris of Germany" for good reason. Its museums were packed with pieces assembled over hundreds of years.

When the Russians arrived, the museums that still stood were empty. The Russians clomped through the marble halls in boots that had marched across frozen steppes, but only echoes greeted them. The walls were bare of paintings; the pedestals held no sculptures. The museums' contents had disappeared.

I never bothered to look any of this up. Hamilton explained it bit by bit over the next couple weeks. His vocabulary seemed to grow daily, though his pronunciation often had a hard time keeping up
.

"Empty museums," I said. "Got it."

"No, no. Taken away. Hidden."

"The museums were hidden?"

We were walking in the park. It was closer to September now, and I wondered if Hamilton would need to migrate soon. I was unsure if crows stuck around during the winter.

"Art! Art hidden!"

"Who hid it?"

"Everyone," he clucked, slightly softer, though carrying on a conversation with the bird always entailed him shrieking at some point. "Peasants, farmers, old ladies, houses, attics, cellars. Hidden." He cocked his head one way and then the other, a gesture I had learned was roughly equivalent to a human spreading his arms. "Empty museum."

Hamilton was explaining it all to me, but I still did not understand.

"She's letting me talk now," Hamilton said from the lamppost. I was sitting on the porch with a book. "Really talk."

"You've certainly gotten better," I said, trying to arch an eyebrow. "Who is?"

"Queen Mab."

"The fairy queen?"

The bird bobbed his head.

"Look," I began, "it's enough that I have a talking crow and --"

"We have to find her museum," he croaked, cutting me off. "Like in Dresden. But there, the people brought it back themselves. Not here. It's been too long."

Carla was inside, washing the dishes after dinner. It was the first time I had invited her to my place, and I had been surprised when she had not refused. I cooked pasta, and after we ate she made me go outside while she cleaned up. I had a server for creamer that was shaped like a tiny cow, and I could hear its ceramic hooves clinking against the sill of the window in the kitchen as she worked.

Suddenly everything seemed to click into place.

"Carla is the fairy queen," I said. "I fell in love with Queen Mab."

The crow cocked his head and looked at me like I was an idiot.

"Mab won't come. Or at least, you better hope she won't. She tends to put undue pressure on reality when she shows up. She needs you though, to start putting the museum back together."

"What museum?"

He spread his wings. "The one that used to be here."

A few minutes later Carla pushed the door open with her hip, bringing two mugs of coffee. Hamilton eyed her from the lamppost, and she smiled at him.

"Who were you talking to? I thought I heard voices."

I didn't like lying. "A neighbor."

"Oh." She took the other rocker on the porch and sipped from her mug. "Your cow creamer thing is gone," she said. "I'll get you another one."

"Shaped like a cow?"

She shrugged. "If you want."

Maybe things were not moving fast enough. Maybe I was dense, or I thought the talking crow was some kind of game or gimmick.

In any case, Mab did end up coming herself.

She didn't look like I expected. In plays and paintings she wore a dark gown with gems and leaves in her hair. In the rain, standing in the grass in the backyard, she looked far less human. One breast was painted black and the other silver. She had twigs in her hair.

I could not remember why I had stepped out into the backyard in the rain.

"Once upon a time," she was saying. She spoke as though resuming a discussion we had been having before something interrupted us. "There were two brothers who fell in love with Death. They saw her for the first time at the side of their father, who called them to his bed as he died. When their mother reached down to close his eyes, the two brothers saw Death standing there behind her in a black gown, and they loved her, for she was lovely."