MERCY
Almost every day,
two women walked a dog through the Foret de Soignes on the outskirts of
Brussels. Angelique was a bottled blonde
with a stale, warm and stuffy kind of atmosphere, and she was shaped like an aubergine,
with a raincoat belt delineating where her waist once was. Her companion Enid
was grey-haired and thin, with glasses and sharp features. They met between the
French and Flemish line, Angelique coming from one direction, Enid from the
other.
But this day
Angelique was more upset than usual. “I left my husband in the sitting room
staring into space,” she said. “It just isn’t normal.” They continued on
towards the Rouge Cloitre, a fourteenth century abbey near the fishing pond.
“Last evening, he wanted to know who the woman was preparing our supper,”
Angelique went on. “It was me, of course. There were only the two of us there.”
Enid pressed on down the path, her spaniel trotting ahead. Angelique drew a
tissue from her raincoat pocket. “It is just so silly,” she said.
“Hard
to believe that it’s all on account of his stroke,” Enid answered carefully.
She had seen cases like this before, when she worked in the hospital, all those
years ago. It never ended easily. But she decided it was best to switch the
conversation to something less difficult. After all, these walks were her way
of getting Angelique out of the house, and away from her problems for a while.
A new hair salon had just opened near the Transvaal cemetery. She told
Angelique all about it as they passed the Rouge Cloitre, and walked around the
pond. Old men sat before their fishing lines under a cold gray sky. A crane
stood in the reeds on paper-thin legs, like a figment of imagination. Further
along there were stables, ateliers now, belonging to local artists, and behind
them a muddy field of horses with shaggy fetlocks.
The cloister had
been converted into a tearoom, but now it was closed on account of renovations.
So instead of stopping they continued down the Chemin de Watermaal in the Flemish
part of the forest. A dog had to be on the lead here, while in the French part,
a dog was allowed to go free. Trees arched overhead, and paths for walking and
riding horses knotted through the bracken, through the glades, and into the low
lying valley, which in winter, glistened with icy streams.
But something was
jolting in the path, jolting and rustling on the ground. The dog pointed his
nose at it, sprung back quickly, barked and poked it with his nose again. It
was a wounded bird, a spasm of flutters with twig feet curled against the body.
“Leave it be,” said Enid, pulling the lead up short.
Angelique
peered down. There was a gash on the head, and under one wing gaped a big red
hole. Enid briefly considered removing her Wellington boot and hitting it over
the head. But a fine drizzle had started up, and the inconvenience of taking
her boot off, here where the dirt was soft, turned her thoughts to less
dramatic measures. She walked the dog up the path, watching from a distance. “I
think it fell,” Angelique called out.
“Let’s put it out
of its misery. I’ll get a rock or something.” Enid tied the dog to a tree,
where he continued barking in short quick yelps. She pushed up her sleeves with
the appearance of getting down to business.
Meanwhile Angelique inspected the
bird more closely. The body was round, the chest feathers fluffed up. But the
wings were fully formed and the damaged one kept fanning out. She noticed a
second, pink wound near the tail feathers. “It’s only a baby,” she said. Then,
“Should we wring its neck?”
Enid shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly.
It would be much better to drop something on it.”
Angelique
knelt to scoop the bird into her hands. They were pale hands, with liver spots
on the back, hands that had done a lot of caring in their day but not hands
that were themselves well cared for. Tenderness washed over her. Its body was
warm. The beady eye shuttered and the wing was still. Then a dark red trickle
ran from the beak to her hand.
Enid winced. “Pot ver dekke! Put it down, zulle. If you’re going to kill it, do it
quickly.”
But Angelique had
lost her color, along with her nerve. “I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t. Look,
it’s still alive!”
“Ja, zulle! You have to twist until it
snaps,” said Enid, sounding sure. “I thought
everybody knew that. You have to do
it without thinking.”
The
bird seemed to stare with infinite patience. Angelique felt its warm
palpitations against her palms, as she headed towards a clearing in the trees,
hands cupped.
“Where are you
going now?” Enid challenged. Ferns crackled underfoot. No answer. “You know,
Angelique, if you put it down for a minute, maybe the mother will return. I can
hear them in the trees over here. And there’s a nest,” she added hopefully.
There was an agitated flapping from
the treetops. Angelique was walking in her clodhopper boots with ludicrously
dainty steps, as if the bird were an offering, a sacred vessel demanding
ceremonious behavior. “Is it very high?”
“It’s too high to
put the bird in. Anyway, it won’t be able to feed itself,” Enid said, with
growing impatience. The drizzle was steady and the dog was becoming a nuisance.
But Angelique
would go on. “I just realized something,” she said. “Now that I’ve touched it,
the mother won’t come. It has my smell on it. I think I’ll take it home and
nurse it back to health.” Her hair was dotted with rain, her face bright with
new hope.
The trouble with her friend, Enid
reflected, was that she’d never learned to turn her back on a problem, and that
was why the problem got worse. If a thing made you vulnerable, it made you
weak, and this was sign to let it go.
“You
have enough to worry about,” Enid reminded her. “Without this bird on your
hands. Besides, the last thing this country needs is another pigeon. Shooting
them was a popular sport in the old days, you’ll remember.” Her glasses were
lopsided. From this angle, Angelique couldn’t see her eyes. Her mouth had
become a very thin line.
“Then
maybe the school children at St. Hubert would take it,” said Angelique. “I mean
to say, as an opportunity to learn about nature. They might feed it bread and
water with an eye-dropper!” Angelique had seen this done, she remembered now,
on one of those English vet programs they sometimes showed on television. One couple kept a pigeon, thinking it was a
male until it became egg bound. Then the vet came, a man with a beard and very
gentle eyes, and when the bird recovered, the owners cried right there on
television. “Oh Pigeon,” they sobbed. “You did have us worried!”
“This pigeon wont
survive,” Enid said, feeling the usual resignation drop inside her chest. “This
one is different,” Enid said. But Angelique stayed in her holding pattern,
hoping for the best. She could see a wound was gaping under its wing, and as
she placed the bird back down, she was careful to lay it on its side so that it
didn’t rustle so much. When you didn’t witness the pain, the pain appeared not
to exist.
“I’ll
untie the dog,” Enid said at last.
“No!” her friend
cried. “You can’t. You’re evil to do that, evil to think it--”
“Don’t take it out
on me,” Enid said. These things can’t be helped. A life has its span--”
“That’s not for us
to decide.” Angelique’s cherubic face seemed at once grotesque and pitiful. She
had become a wall, a great big bundle of reproach.
“Sometimes it is,”
Enid retorted.
“What is?”
“Sometimes it is
for us to decide. We kill chickens to eat them, and even in the hospital
sometimes, I remember—“ her voice trailed off.
Angelique stared
at her friend as the rain dripped around them. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing surprising.
Just that sometimes a child would be born in the maternity ward, years ago,
when I was a nurse starting out. A child would be born, whose prospects, let’s
say, were clearly limited—“ she looked at the ground, the expression on her
face suddenly conflicted.
“You killed it?”
Angelique trembled like the bird.
“Not me,” said
Enid. “I would never kill a baby. But sometimes an accident might happen. And I
would agree, you had to agree, that it was simply for the best.”
Angelique
turned in disbelief. Looking down at her hands, she saw the bird’s blood. She
faced the bracken stretching under the tees. Rain misted the landscape. The fir
trees arched, cathedral-like, overhead, and beyond them the white sky,
endlessly far away. She stumbled as she moved towards a clearing, sick and
conflicted, all but sobbing.
“Pull
yourself together,” said Enid steadily. “It’s only a bird, after all.” She bent
towards the earth, staring at the bird.
Angelique
was breathing in shudders, hard jagged breaths of hurt and burden. “You are
saying that you put people out of their misery?”
“I can’t talk
about this.” Enid’s voice was almost inaudible. Her back was stooped, no room
for anyone but her in that thin, ungenerous body. Then at last she stood, brushed her hands
together and placed them on her hips. Her face burned with shame. “I could have
told you it wouldn’t be easy. The more you delay the harder it becomes. You
have to take the bird’s neck and twist it sharply until it snaps. The head goes
in one direction and the body goes in the other.”
Angelique blinked.
She looked all damp and patchy. “So did you? You put people out of their
misery? Is death preferable to pain, in your opinion?”
“How
should I know? I’m not the expert.”
The
rain let up, and light glinted through the wet trees. The two women turned and
headed down the path, Enid at one with nothing but her dog. But the bird
remained. At least, Angelique thought she could feel its tiny life as a very
thin thread spinning out, thinning out the further they got away.
They
left the forest and passed the neat brick houses of Avenue des Heros. Tidy
gardens bloomed with daffodils and dark red tulips, like little cups of blood
on stems. The green scent of newly cut grass floated on the air, and somewhere
from the hedgerow a blackbird was singing.
Her husband was
still in the living room chair, when Angelique returned. His head was tilted
back, his mouth open, and he was asleep. He was dressed in his pale blue
cardigan. His knees and thighs seemed shrunken in their twill trousers. She
noticed the vulnerability of his feet, turned slightly towards each other. His
shoes were beautifully polished, Angelique always made sure of that; and the
laces were perfectly tied.
But
his complexion was sallow. The skin seemed to stretch across the bone these
days, particularly over the nose, and he snorted in his sleep, as if disturbed
by dreams.
I’ve
smothered you before, she thought; smothered you with love when you did not
want it. Nothing new there.
She
went to the kitchen and put on the kettle. She washed the bird blood off her
hands. Then she returned, still in her raincoat, and stood before her husband.
Her face was gleaming. It would only take as long as it took to boil the
kettle.
On
the sofa was a small, embroidered cushion with silken tassels. It was a fussy
non-functional cushion, but it shouldn’t be hard to place the cushion over his
face. She would only have to press down, as if imprinting his image on the
cloth. She had made such a movement dozens of times, packing linens into an
overstuffed trunk, for instance. But she was thinking too much. She would have
to do it without thinking.
The
hallway clock ticked the morning forwards. Angelique was conscious of the rose
smelling soap on her hands, as well as her own heavy breathing. Deliver us, she
thought. Then, at last came the high-pitched whistle of the kettle. It sang
out.
