A cage went in search of a bird.
—KAFKA
Keep your canary under lock and key. In Seattle, a suspicious-looking empty cage was observed lurking outside of a pet store by Elizabeth Bauman, a registered nurse, whose car had broken down one night on her way back from work.
A heavily made-up elderly woman, arrested for shoplifting in a Berlin department store claimed she saw a birdcage adorned with expensive necklaces and earrings riding the escalators just a moment ago.
Despondent owing to the death of Isolda, his beloved canary, the opera tenor, Arturo Balderachi from Pisa, in a fit of rage threw her cage out of the window in the direction of the famous leaning tower.
In New York, seven violations have been issued last month to an unkempt birdcage seen begging around town for birds.
Finding her husband, François, age sixty-nine, trying to stick his head into a birdcage, Mme Santé, wearing only a flimsy white nightgown, ran out in the middle of the night into the streets of Paris to seek a doctor or a priest.
A birdcage belonging to an unknown person was found unattended by an alert usher in the first row of a cinema in Montevideo watching Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds. “I’m telling you, Angelita, the world has gone crazy,” some old lady was heard to mutter on the way out.
The birdcage is lonely. It strokes itself with a bird feather and cries itself to sleep every night.
After finding an empty cage on his doorstep, Aaron Bosselaar, a schoolteacher in Antwerp, filed a complaint with the police against a dead Czech author of several incomprehensible books that only certifiable dingbats, like his wife, Laure-Anne, pretend to understand.
Too poor to buy him a bird, the parents of little Alfred Krauss gave him an empty cage for Christmas with a paper-cut of a parrot and told him to feed it crumbs of angel cake every night before going to sleep.
While the bickering of two housewives over whose son broke the window of a funeral parlor was putting the judge to sleep, a policeman brought into the courtroom a birdcage accused of propositioning a street sparrow to have a go at one of its swings.
Roderigo, a young surrealist poet, was reading in the park a poem he had just composed and which compares his love to “a cage full of wild beasts” to Amanda, an aspiring ballet dancer in the tradition of Isadora Duncan, when a flying pigeon dropped its doo-doo on his black, curly hair and his green velvet jacket.
Thinking that the cage capsizing in the Seine contained a pair of lovebirds, Théophile, a tenderhearted orphan visiting Paris from Lunéville, jumped after it, and not knowing how to swim, drowned before he could be rescued.
A bird seen fleeing on foot across the lawn with a cage in hot pursuit astonished a party of British swells who were playing croquet and sipping champagne on the lawn of a palatial country home, leaving them, in their advanced state of inebriation, short of words.
Oh, my God! A cage hanging from the ceiling in a rented room occupied by a lodger the landlady claimed never to have seen. An extensive search of the premises by the police proved fruitless in locating any possessions or a suicide note belonging to the pitiful contraption made of wire.
No one has yet researched the psychological effect an empty birdcage would have on a goldfish were it to be lowered in its aquarium, said Professor Sadoff at the imposing gathering of the Academy of Science, to which only one graybeard in attendance was seen to nod his head vigorously in agreement.
It occurred to Chairman Mao one day to find out from his chief of secret police how many empty cages there were in China and whether they were being carried about at night by suspicious individuals he was not aware of or were they ghosts of some of his old party comrades whom he had imprisoned and tortured over the years?
After robbing a bank in Kansas City, Garfield Jones, whose nickname was “Baby Face,” made himself unobtrusive in the lunch-hour crowd by carrying the money in a birdcage which he had prudently covered with a dark cloth usually used to put a bird to sleep at night.
In Andalusia, a matador by the name of Pepete astounded the spectators, judges and picadors by using a red birdcage as a muleta to further enrage the charging bull.
“Birdcages of the world, free yourself from filthy birds,” shouted the young Peruvian revolutionary as he was being led blindfolded before the firing squad.
Walking backwards on the street, the retired mailman, Kurt Brown, who had grown even more eccentric after he was fired from his job for having concealed decades of undelivered mail in his basement, met a birdcage going in the opposite direction.
Little ones, the cage whispered to some chickadees, look at the lovely swing, ladder and mirror I have for you. You’ll live like a prince and princess, waking every morning in your palace to a breakfast of golden seeds and the admiration of every cat in the neighborhood as you take turns splashing in your bath and warbling to each other.
Bracing itself on the parapet of a schoolhouse high above the street, the cage waited for paper planes that come flying out of open windows on long, warm June afternoons when teachers doze off at their desks, to ask them, as they circle in the air, what should it do next?
Its tiller damaged, the fearless cage sailing across the Atlantic to catch a bird in the jungles of the Amazon that was reputed to be extraordinarily stupid, abandoned its voyage and returned safely to its home in a fire station in Bremen.
In a village in Transylvania, a gypsy woman found an empty cage and filled it with tarot cards and white mice in order to mystify and entice the gullible and drive away those who see the devil’s hand at work even at country fairs.
“If you were a prison that didn’t have a single prisoner wouldn’t you yearn for one?” said the cage to the blue sky as it lay on the railroad track expecting Eurostar to come its way instead of a local rattler full of caged chickens and boxes of fresh eggs.
And what did you, dear Madame, expect the cage to look like after fifty years of searching for a bird? Waiting for years by the side of some road to hitch a ride, sleeping under bridges, drowning one’s disappointment in dives from Hong Kong to San Francisco, meeting jewel thieves, burglars, bank robbers, fortune-tellers and listening to their advice without ever enticing one damn bird.
“It’s because you kept searching,” a wise man in India told the distraught cage. “If you had stayed in Aunt Zelda’s kitchen all these years, one day when the window was open a bird would have flown in on its own and made the acquaintance of your charming self.”
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First published in Boulevard (2007).