The Vulture

"A gentlemen came by and asked why I tolerated the vulture. "I'm helpless," I said. "He came and started hacking at me". "

The Vulture, Franz Kafka

"The short story is a cage looking for a bird."

Franz Kafka

Content Warning:

Scenes some may find disturbing 

Transcript

The Vulture

The Sunday after he got back from the music tour to France, Oscar went with his mother, as agreed, to a quaker meeting. His mother, Janet, a long-lapsed Anglican, had recently entered a phase of spiritual curiosity, of hunger. It would not be facetious to say that the menopause had something to do with it. A significant aspect of her being was shutting down, sinking into the darkness of permanent dormancy. Full of this gynaecological November, this sense of twilight, it was only natural that she looked for meaning and nourishment in places she hadn’t before, that she saw things a little differently, that she keenly sensed, general in the world, what she called in a diary entry the “finitude of possibility”. She read novels she had always wanted to read but, for whatever reason, never had. She decided to, at long last, learn the oboe. A relatively costly instrument she had purchased from Howarth’s nearly a decade ago lay gathering dust in the cupboard under the stairs. She had sought it, found it, opened up the case, constructed it. With the help of a local teacher, she was beginning to make musical notes of her preliminary squeaks and squeals. At the close of that April, she was going to Australia. As far back as she could remember she had always wished to see wild kangaroos.

            As to the matter of her new religion, beginning her search for it she decided to start in the place where, in theory at least, she felt most comfortable. And that was Quakerism. She had had a little exposure to it: both her parents had attended Quaker meetings sporadically throughout the seventies and eighties, (though perhaps not with the requisite fidelity and sympathy to justifiably call themselves quakers); she also had a work colleague who was a quaker. A rather fiery, rather bellicose woman, ironically, who habitually made known her unswerving pacifism with a sense of more than a little enragement. And yet Janet did not find it hard to imagine her in quietness, found it perfectly plausible that she, as well as any other, might succumb to that weekly silence for which the quakers are so well known.

            Janet found the tenets attractive: Separatist Protestant, a Christianity of chapel rather than church, the quakers’ address of one another as “friends”, the unprogrammed taciturnity of their ritual vigil broken by occasional spoken testimony, their belief in the priesthood of all believers, and in the guiding light of witness accessible in the lives of all human beings. She found herself charmed by their teetotalism, their pacifism, their refusal to swear oaths, and their historical opposition to slavery. But more importantly than all that, she felt a pull she couldn’t explain. Something was carrying her towards this particular faith, something was being communicated to her and forming in her mind that she found astonishingly beautiful. What a thing to wish for: to quake, to be one that quakes before the majesty and mercy of God. What a state to elect for oneself, to occupy. It was also the waiting she respected. The silence was what gave meaning to the words of those friends led to speak aloud, but it was the waiting that gave that silence meaning in the first place. Janet imagined a building, simple not severe, brimming with the patience of all those people gathered to wait for that epiphanic light, for witness, for that glimpse of the divine. She should like to wait too, but not alone; she wanted to wait with them.

Oscar wasn’t too sure why his mother wanted him to attend the meeting with her. Her thirst and curiosity he understood but not the desire for him to enter into the spirit of it. Maybe she was just a bit shy, he surmised, and didn’t want to go alone. He was quite sure that she had no aspirations of a spiritual nature for his soul. As a matter of fact, he was fairly convinced that his soul was in a state of considerable healthiness. He was kind, and polite, and enterprising, and thoughtful, and hardworking, according to his lights. As with most ventures into unfamiliar precincts, Oscar didn’t really want to go to the quaker meeting. But there was no question of his going. He had agreed to go with his mother to the meeting because she had paid the last and most substantial instalment of the money for the music tour. It was such a small price to pay for generosity so considerable, that he found it a little heartbreaking.

Oscar’s mother was in the driving seat, the steering wheel enormous in her small, pale hands. For the most part they knew exactly where they were going. The street and building were not familiar to them but they didn’t expect to run into much trouble locating them. It was an approximate twenty-minute drive to the area where the meeting house was situated. As if in rehearsal for the imminent taciturnity, something to which they were not well accustomed, neither Oscar nor his mother said anything. Oscar put on Symphony Fantastique, and skipped to the third movement, his favourite. Across their great distances, like little flashes of light amongst shrouds of silence, the oboe and the cor anglais spoke to one another in their pastoral accents. Oscar’s hands were restless and he’d a little tick, a quick mortified mannerism where he’d open his wallet and check the cards inside, touching each one as if to reaffirm that nothing was missing. Various glossy, plastic cards lay lodged in the pinched pockets, among much less durable paper tickets from his recent trip to France. Tram tickets, a ticket of admission to a particular tower the group had gone up, a ferry ticket, and a ticket of entrance to the district zoo. The bright green of the zoo ticket, with vertical flamingo and roaring baboon both imaged on the front, immediately took his mind back to the zoo his group had visited before the first concert. 

            He had had an experience in the open avian section which he could only describe as revelatory. It involved a vulture, two vultures really. It involved many of the birds. Ibises and parakeets and storks and the scary, waddling shoe-bill and the fluffy kookaburras and the clacking hornbill and the squawking birds of paradise. Experiences, all of them fresh and newly-impressed, jostled, multiple, in his mind. Time had yet to sort the essential from the dispensable. He remembered one significant moment, a weighty part out of a minute, where it seemed that all the birds in the aviary were ganging up on him. He stopped, and stood where he was on the sandy path that went twisting on and on through the trees. He was sure that their calls were becoming shriller, that the birds were all letting up a warlike, ravenous, carnivorous chorus, that they were creeping closer, closing in, surrounding him from all sides, that their panoply of colourful war paint was forming a menacing cordon around him, that he was about to come to harm. But no-one else in his group had this sense, and he soon saw that it was his imagination that had so extravagantly offered up this scene, not the world in which they all walked. 

            In the car, on their way to the meeting house, Oscar’s eyes lay lazily upon the passing landscape. The fields and the woods, and the blackthorn not yet in blossom. Looking out he began to feel melancholy, and he wondered, genuinely, if there was anything sadder in the world than a car window. He turned from this portal, and sank into himself, dropped into a kind of contemplative sulk. He found himself having conversations long concluded, saying again, in his head and to no-one but himself, the things he had said. Scenes came to him, remembered, in the familiar and nebulous form lived experience takes. Things that were true came to him, truths. If those truths were sad, he had no way of hiding from the sadness. What had gone unsaid his busy, noiseless mind said to itself, mercilessly, repeatedly. How on the infrequent occasions that he joined in, because he was shy and quiet, he never knew the rules of any of the card games that they played; he wasn’t quick to become acquainted with them. How most of the people around him only lacked musical talent and musical fervour because their satiety and contentment came from other sources in their lives. How much pity and how little respect he had felt for the bassoonist who wore the lanyard around her neck, the dangling laminated tag with its words about autism this and neurodivergent that and processing difficulties the other. How that to stand out and attract attention had been his main reason for buying the big fluff-stuffed snake from the zoo giftshop that he ended up giving as a present to his younger brother. How superior he felt when one of the boys in his room had too much to drink on the last night at the hostel, and threw up in his bed. Oscar remembered the startled, helpless look in his eyes, the way he moved, sluggishly, like a slow, servile animal, stirring confused from the puddle of ruddy vomit beside him; he remembered pulling the soiled turtleneck from the boy’s upper body and washing it in the sink and folding it up, collecting and soaking up the orange mess as best he could with tissues and a flannel. Recalling a particularly irksome episode, Oscar filled with tantalising irritation: one of the brass players had taken his stand with the music on it from the backstage area and he’d had to run around the auditorium for nearly ten minutes, frantically searching for it.  

            As the clarinet on the CD player whispered its soft, starlit solo over pizzicato strings, Oscar’s mind went back once again to the vulture. He remembered entering the aviary through iron doors, shutting them behind him with a clunk. He remembered feeling bored and without purpose as he ambled through the zoo, approaching each enclosure with pallid curiosity, feeling only the mildest elation when he spied what was within, camouflaged, sleepy, indifferent. He remembered how he had wanted to sit down in the orchestra, rehearse, play his concert, do something he was good at, be spectacle rather than spectator. He remembered the pair of vultures behind him, overhead, on the corrugated roof of the little cabin that separated the aviary from the rest of the zoo. He spun around to face them. The vultures were copulating with a clattering, pattering commotion. The male had mounted the almost perfectly identical female and was holding her fast in tough, determined claws. Then, the genital activity graciously screened all the while by black plumage, he slipped down and entered her, capaciously flapping his black, lordly wings as he inseminated her. Oscar remembered how his companions straggled behind while he had gone on ahead. By the time they had caught up, the vultures had parted from one another. The female had withdrawn from the male, and had winged sullenly away to a bough where she could be alone. The expression on the male vulture’s face remained the same throughout, a stern, philosophic, human seriousness that fixed all those who stood before him in its glare. Oscar remembered staying for a long time, long after the others had caught up to him and moved on again, locked into an intense, searching stare, aware that he was looked at by the vulture, and the vulture just as aware that Oscar was looking at him. What did it mean? He remembered not feeling as he usually felt about vultures. Sinister, foreboding, diabolic scavengers, creatures of darkness and malignity. No, he saw something different this time. The vulture did not utter a syllable, having no reason to wail aloud. His shrunken, red face flashed with something like mischief, just a swift, subtle shard of it, and then he seemed almost to bow, darkly, before hopping into flight and flying away.

            In his mind, Oscar went over the concerts the orchestra had played. He couldn’t shake a disarmingly familiar feeling of disappointment, the feeling of something very special being in reach, shimmering like a mirage in their rehearsals but the perfect deficit of willpower and ability unable to make it reality, giving the French audiences of their three concerts, two of them mostly very warm, one of them rather cooler, little more than a substantial dose of the very ordinary. The concerts were badly programmed, Oscar couldn’t help thinking, too long, the tour rehearsals rushed, the most ideal items they had worked on in the UK over the last year and of which they had given the strongest performances sidelined in favour of weaker, more ambitious ones. The conductor, Mel, had a habit of losing focus, of losing sight of the collective goal, becoming wrapped up in his own personal, pet projects. It made Oscar angry. That people were readily thoughtless and reluctantly thoughtful, that people made bad decisions more frequently than they made good ones, that he couldn’t play his clarinet in a better orchestra, an orchestra formed of people more like him. It left him with his faith in that most deeply-held article of belief much renewed: there’s no-one like me, I’m like nobody. He had made one mistake of his own in the second concert which continued to torment him. A squeak in the second movement of La Mer, during a soft passage, and which would offend even the most musically illiterate ear.   

            The world went by. Fields of scattered, beige cows and plump, rice-white sheep, battered old homesteads, wheatfields, trees damask and aghast with frenzies of blossom though the hedgerows were still black as tar. A kestrel lay, floating, upon the air. Its long, perfect moment of poise and equilibrium sent out a great hush, an illusion of etherisation or suspension over the world. Then there were the terraces, lines of terraced homes, red-bricked most of them. At the end of the long, packed rows of chimney-potted houses, where streets turned sharply off into new streets, there would invariably stand a lone newsagent’s, or a pub called something like The Merchant’s Arms or The Victoria. Then it was the town centre and the big train station and the magistrate’s court and the Palace Hotel, blue and gold. There were lots of people in the world, getting onto and off of trains, flooding the streets from every direction, people of every scruffiness, every conceivable gradation, from the most pristine and spotlessly uniformed, to the most degraded and blemished. 

            Soon enough, Oscar and his mother were in the quieter quarter. By now the march to the scaffold was over and the full opium-induced mayhem of the symphony was roaring, ugly and nightmarish and intoxicated from the speaker. Janet turned the volume down. Oscar turned the CD off. He’d had enough of the piping piccolo clarinet and the bassoons, rippling, manic and humorous, underneath. Before they had time to wonder where it was, look at a map and search for it, they were already outside the building of square and sober brick that they were seeking. The building was Georgian, of tones that were once flaxen but now deep olive. George’s Meeting House, the sign said. There was a notice board of bark-brown wood which had painted on in cream-white lettering Meeting times: Sunday, 10.30 am. Wednesday: 5.15 pm. The sign was just a printed banner, a strong enough wind could probably blow it away, but the wooden noticeboard had a feeling of permanence about it. This was comforting to Janet, and assured her that the quakers were here to stay, that the building was unambiguously theirs and they weren’t just passing through. The doors were already open. Janet parked in the little car park and she and Oscar got out, making for the dark opening, both of them peculiarly hungry for the ghostly, attentive hush they expected immediately to find within. It was a sort of compulsion towards profundity that pulled them. 

            In the foyer they found a rather more casual scene than they had anticipated, laughter, chatter, and a few scarce cups of tea. People standing around, milling about, people both young and old. Oscar and his mother were immediately spotted and welcomed.

            Oscar was quick to make his exit from the social situation of which he unexpectedly found himself a part. He went into the meeting house, crossing the threshold of the main part of the building, leaving behind the foyer. He sat down in the pew about three benches in from the back and feigned, as best he was able, a deep, prayerful stillness that would tell anyone who approached that he wished to be left alone. He looked about, pious and introverted and contemplative as ever. Aside from an unimposing pulpit and the humble pews, the meeting house had none of the usual attributes that would allow Oscar to think of it as a church, or even a chapel. Its austerity was dull to Oscar at first, even abrasively so. Not severe exactly, just stubbornly boring, dismal. The absence of altar, of images or statues or icons of any kind, of stained glass in the windows, all depressed him. His mind’s eye revisited the magnificent Catholic spaces he had experienced in France (or rather they visited him), in whose echoing dustiness and stern luminosities he had sat and been existent, lingering, human. He thought back to the vaulting aspiration of the ecclesiastical structures, the dwarfing intensity and focus of their antechapels and sanctuaries, adorned tabernacle and six candles, angels and flowers replete, and giant crucifix before watching stained-glass saints, or no saints at all. This place was different. He felt that he was in a musty-smelling waiting room, consecrated for some obscure intellectual exercise he did not yet understand and did not look forward to learning more about. Cocking his head, one way and then the other, he saw that the windows were beautifully clean. That’s when he experienced his first ameliorating ray of understanding: that because the windows were of ordinary glass, transparent and washed so they gleamed, he could see the world through them. Not that it was much to look at, but it was the world none the less. Grey, airy sky, overcast, clouded. Trees, a trunk wound with ivy, big-leaved and coiling.  

            His mother idled in the hallway of entrance, where there were tables and shelves full of literature and scriptural volumes, but not for very long. She soon joined her son in the pew. They were the first ones in position, the first to begin the famous waiting, though they hadn’t a clue how to do it. They were soon joined by other friends, lonely spectres. There were three young families. The noise of children’s voices did not quieten with the beginning of the worship and the elect leader’s words of welcome but wove itself into the hush of the meeting house and became part of it, synonymous, inoffensive. But after about five minutes, when the leader was seated again and silence reigned, something about the quiet of the adults, the noise of quakers sitting in silence, saying nothing, somehow infected the children and they too quietened and became key, soprano contributors in the choric effort of that silence. 

            It was an interesting silence, that Oscar couldn’t deny. In the early stages of the meeting, it was a harmless, engrossing, pensive silence. One couldn’t break such a silence too swiftly, one couldn’t speak with authenticity so early in proceedings, Oscar surmised. 

            But after a while the silence became embarrassing. Oscar felt himself squirming, wanting it to end. He tried to disappear, to manifest his own evaporation. Luckily, a woman soon stood up, led to do so, and spoke. She had on a lavender-coloured cardigan, a powder blue dress, and dull yellow crocs. Her hair was more or less completely white. As she got up, the leader who had introduced the worship looked at her intently, with, to Oscar’s mind, a look of peculiar trepidation, as if he felt apprehensive about what was to leave her lips. He wondered what she had said before at previous meetings. He wondered about all that had been said before, at meetings, in this meeting house. He tried to imagine, variously, the ugliest statement, the most shocking admission, the most amusing joke. The woman said that she felt led to speak but wasn’t sure what she wanted to say, or what the spirit wanted her to say. So, she just said that she liked being there, in the meeting house. She said that everyone seemed very quiet. She said that she missed her husband. Then she sang two verses of a hymn she loved, words she remembered from her childhood, the notes of the frail air imperfectly recalled. She had changed key by the end, but the words were more or less there. She sat back down.

            A few moments later, a man stood up. Asymmetrical posture, a stoop, spectacles, long blond hair. Very quickly, Oscar couldn’t follow what the man was saying. He spoke in an unsteady mutter, stammering often and having to retreat a few words and repeat them each time he stammered. He spoke about ships, the Titanic in particular, a documentary he had watched the evening previous. Then he sat back down.   

            When that was over, silence was majesty again but it was more humid, more hectoring than before. Oscar looked to his mother for help. She showed no sign of speaking. When people spoke, she listened attentively. When all was quiet again, she sank into a morose-looking introversion.

            And then, quite suddenly, utterly mystified as to where the impulse came from, Oscar stood up and began to speak.

            “Hello,” he began. “I’m Oscar. Me and my mother are new here. I only came because my mother wanted me to. She said she’d help pay for this orchestra tour I just went on, to France, if I came with her to a quaker meeting when I got back. Anyway…when I was in France, I went to the zoo. And in the zoo, in the bird section, I saw a vulture. Two vultures actually. They were mating. They were… They were…shagging.” He couldn’t believe he’d just said that. The profanity, or quasi-profanity tasted bitter in his mouth and lit tartly upon the calm room. His mother didn’t react. “Mating” just didn’t convey the force, the vigour of what he had witnessed.

            The leader immediately responded:

            “Please refrain from the use of profanity when speaking.”

            “Sorry,” Oscar replied, not fully convinced “shagging” qualified as profanity. Somehow he didn’t feel mortified. He believed he had been doing nothing more than obeying the force that called it out of him. He went on: “Anyway, that didn’t last for very long. The female flew away. But the male vulture stayed. And he was the vulture that really…got me. So…” he wasn’t sure where he was going, he didn’t know where he was going to end up. But he kept on walking, figuratively speaking: “So, I’m standing before this vulture. Bald, red-headed. Mean-looking. A few hairs on its pink neck. And the rest of it…black. Black as soot, black as jet, black as the ace of spades. He’s just sitting there, on this tin roof. Sitting there, waiting for me to…figure out something, see something, get something out of the encounter. And that’s when…” 

            He felt the sadness in his heart. He had known it was coming but it came with an intensity that took him by surprise. He felt the quiver of tears, in his voice-box, behind his eyes, everywhere. But he didn’t wish to cry. He wished to carry on speaking and so he didn’t allow the impulse to weep even an instant of acknowledgment:

            “That’s when I start to feel sad, moved. More moved than sad. And I see what I never saw before. That the vulture is a sorrowful, beautiful bird. A kind of swan. A dark, unloved, unlovely swan. Everyone likes and appreciates swans. They sing a swansong, they belong to the sovereign. But no-one loves vultures. But they are unafraid of the dead, of death. They live to feast on the dead, they mate to make babies that will eat the dead, that will grow into great, fully grown vultures, fattened on the flesh of the dead. They circle and swarm around the dead. They descend to the dead. They eat the dead. They bite off the flesh of the dead in their jaws and eat it. I would like to be eaten by vultures. I would like to be a carcass in a desiccated, lonely land and be spied by vultures. I would like them to eat me. Thank you.”

            Oscar sat. Stern contemplation was replaced with tense, upset speechlessness. The children were confused and did not understand. There was the occasional soft growl or groan of consternation. 

When the meeting was over, Oscar and his mother drove home in silence.

            Leaving the town behind, looking out at the sparsening houses, Oscar thought about vultures. He thought about his vulture. He pictured it, privately rejoiced in his ability to love it. He did not regret what he said. 

            At last, he broke the silence, his and his mother’s, saying:

            “Someone removed my stand without telling me before our second concert on the tour. They took my stand with my music on it. I had no idea where my stand was, or where my music was. The thoughtlessness. You know, I could have killed him. I really think I could’ve. There was about a minute when I knew I would kill him. If his identity was known, and I had him in my hands, I would have killed him”.

That night, Oscar had a very strange dream. He was sitting in a quaker meeting house. Not the same as that day, a different one, an imagined one, the edifice and the interior some composite of various real buildings he had seen or been inside. The people all had the face of Jesus, or rather a face Oscar thought might conceivably be the face of Jesus. Old women had the face of Jesus. Little boys and little girls had the face of Jesus. All men, and all women: a deadened, haunted, cloned face of Jesus. It was frightening, even revolting, in its drained ubiquity. It was as though no-one in the world was born naturally anymore, no-one was conceived, made in the womb, delivered. People were just cut out from bits of other people, fashioned into pale human form. In the dream, Oscar stood up and got down and laid himself on the floor of the meeting house. The men and the women and the children rose dutifully, expectantly from their seats. They began swarming, circling. They began flapping their arms like wings and closing in on him. They taunted him and alarmed him with great, guttural shrieks. They enclosed him in their dark avidity and mockery and despair. The people all stooped down and began to pound his body, and shake him, and scratch him. They kissed him and licked their lips and nibbled him and made ready to eat him. Or so it seemed.

            Oscar woke up. His heart was beating fast, there was a sweat on his brow. For a moment, he was terrified. But he soon recognised the world around him, he recognised it as the world to which he belonged, and he calmed. He went back to sleep. 

            By morning, he had forgotten his dream. But he could still remember the vulture, black, post-coital, and serene. It would always be there, heavy-feathered, an omen, a daemon, a solemn witness, glum, powerful, standing over him, watching, waiting.