Black Bird (20 page)

“Ah, miss,” began Woland, as they almost collided in the doorway. But he couldn’t continue, because Aline shrieked in shock.

Grace responded, cawing and screeching and fluttering about the ceiling; Aline jumped back.

Now Woland was shocked, by the noise of the two and their quick, frantic, purposeless movements.

“I’m so sorry, miss, I didn’t mean to scare you.” Woland was not happy. This wasn’t turning out the great whirlwind of an entrance he was hoping for.

“Mais qui êtes-vous? Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?” Aline was angry. She’d been frightened by this stranger, and he had the nerve to walk about her home like it belonged to him. And he couldn’t even speak to her in French.

Woland began feeling defensive. “Uhm, I’m looking for Jean-Baptiste.”

This calmed Aline a little; perhaps he was some friend of her grandson’s. Still, he was quite rude. She had a chance now to look at him for the first time. He was a tall man, and thin. He wore a light grey jacket, tight, with matching pants; black shiny shoes; black leather gloves; a blue tie rather like a cravat; and a small, high black hat. He had a pencil moustache and, somewhere, she suspected, a monocle on a ribbon. This was a friend of Jean-Baptiste’s?

The commotion attracted Father, who stood now in the hall behind Woland. “What is it? Who are you?”

Woland turned to him gratefully. “Ah, sir, I’m looking for Jean-Baptiste. I understand he lives here?”

Father considered this question, which seemed to throw doubts on Professor Woland’s legitimacy. If he was a friend, surely he’d know whether Jean-Baptiste lived here or not. Still … “Are you a friend of his?”

“Not exactly,” began Woland.

“Then who the hell are you?” Father exploded. “Haven’t you heard of doorbells?”

“Well, the door was open.” Woland was beginning to feel the heat, and loosened his cravat.

“For Christ’s sake. Your mouth’s open, shall I put my fist in it?”

Woland was baffled by this fury. Somehow, he’d lost the authority he’d been planning to claim here. He’d never gotten the chance to assert it. All his daydreams of sweeping the household, whomever it might contain, off its feet and into his plans vanished. The crow was still flying around, dangerously close, thought Woland.

“If I might just see Jean-Baptiste,” Professor Woland rallied. A bad start, yes, but no reason not to sally forth. A few proper steps and he could put this unfortunate beginning behind him, get to the business at hand and still probably win the day.

“Oh. Whom shall I say is calling?” asked Father, with a false deference.

Woland pulled himself up. He was sure his next words were going to change everything. After this,
he’d be back in his dreams. “My name is Woland. Of the Black Snow Theatre Company.”

Father grunted. He walked slowly back down the hall to the foot of the stairs and, while Woland watched expectantly, shouted up:

“Jean-Baptiste! Some fairy from a theatre to see you.”

“It’s the oddest thing,” said Jean-Baptiste. “I just finished writing this play last week. How did you know?”

“A play? Excellent! Just what I was hoping. Let me have a look at it.”

“Well, I have to have it typed.”

“Let me see.” Woland grasped the book from Jean-Baptiste’s hands and began flipping through its pages. At last he turned back to the front and began to read. He stood holding the book and his walking stick in the same hand, absently pacing in the room, nodding and “Hmming” as Jean-Baptiste, who sat on his bed, could only wonder, stupefied, how indeed this man came to be calling for his play. Out of the blue.

“Of course it’s just the first draft,” said Jean-Baptiste.

“Yes, yes. I’m so glad you realize it,” said Woland. “You wouldn’t believe how many writers refuse to change anything. But no, no, I wouldn’t worry if I were you. This is very good. Needs work, it’s not yet a play, it’s just words here on paper, but already I sense the potential.”

“Good.”

“Let me take this away and read it, and we’ll meet again next week. You’ll come down to my office, we’ll have a nice coffee.”

“I still have to type it,” said Jean-Baptiste tentatively.

“Oh, your handwriting’s perfectly legible.” Woland put the notebook into his inside jacket pocket.

“Excuse me,” said Jean-Baptiste, “but that’s the only copy.”

“Is it? I’ll be careful, then. I’ll make you a copy myself, at the office. Come by on Tuesday and I’ll have a photocopy for you, and we can chat longer then. I’ll read this on the weekend, but already I can tell we’re going to work together.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like the original book back.” Jean-Baptiste held out his hand.

Woland shook it. “Oh, of course, how stupid of me. Tuesday, then, say eleven-thirty? Perhaps we’ll have lunch.” And Woland practically ran out of the room, flew down the stairs and disappeared into the street.

Woland threw the photocopy on the desk. Jean-Baptiste’s heart sank as he saw that many lines of dialogue had been crossed out with wide strokes of a black marker. He knew this was going to happen.

Woland handed back Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. He opened it and flipped a few pages. What he saw shocked him.

“What the hell is this?” he nearly screamed. Frantically he flipped through the notebook page by page. And on virtually every one of the pages, one or more lines had been obliterated with a thick black marker.

“Those are some corrections I’ve made.”

“You’ve crossed them out!”

Woland shrugged. He’d seen this kind of reaction from writers before. As if they thought they knew something he didn’t. “Sometimes a deletion is a correction.”

“But you’ve erased my words. My words!”

“Calm yourself. Words are our common property. You don’t own the language.”

Jean-Baptiste threw down the notebook.
“This
language I do. Words I write down are mine. You’ve no right to delete them.”

“I thought you understood there’d be work to do.”

“You don’t just erase the first draft! Changes, yes, but for God’s sake, make the damned photocopy before you erase the words.”

“But my dear boy, then we’d have two different scripts. How would we work together on the revisions?”

“Revisions?”

“Yes, of course. You must rewrite much of it according to my direction. And I can pay you nothing.”

“What? Why should I agree? What do I get from such an arrangement?”

“Simply that I will produce your play. Your name will appear on it and you will have this credit. It will begin your career.”

“And why rewrite? And which parts? Why not use my own words?”

“First of all, you have too many characters. We’ll have to lose many of them. Actors cost money, you know. And you’ll have to cut out these words entirely. You cannot say these words on the stage.”

“I hear them on television.”

“Perhaps. But the theatre is high art, and in high art we don’t have every character begin or end every exclamation with a blasphemous expression.”

“How about
merde?”

“Merde
is fine. We’ll just switch all these
tabernacs
and
calices
for
merde
. Shit has been acceptable onstage for over a hundred years.”

And that’s the way it went, for weeks. Woland demanded cuts and changes that baffled Jean-Baptiste, which convinced him Woland was a complete idiot who understood nothing. For his part, Woland made free with the play as if it were his own and continually insisted he was older, wiser and more experienced in the theatre than the young playwright. But Jean-Baptiste had to admit that at least there was nothing personal in these attacks and changes: he was often surprised when, at rehearsals, after a particularly fine scene had been played out, Woland would rise and berate the actors.

“No, no, no! Don’t you understand what you’re saying? Stop jumping on your lines, let the audience absorb them! Don’t look downstage as you come in, you idiot!”

Nevertheless, the time came when he had to argue.
“You’ve completely made a hash of it. You’ve taken out all the transitional scenes.”

“They were unnecessary, Jean-Baptiste.” “It doesn’t make any sense without them. They were some of the best scenes.”

“It doesn’t matter. The audience will understand better what your play is about if we cut through the explanations and let the characters get on with it.”

“But now it’s too short, for one thing.” Woland heaved a sigh. And then, as if by magic, he said the one thing that could possibly have shut Jean-Baptiste up. “It’s not about how long it is, is it? Is that why we’re here? Look, son, you’re a big admirer of Artaud, aren’t you? Well, what did he say? No more masterpieces, right? Stop hanging on to your favourite scenes as if they’re the best scenes. They’re not even what the play’s about. What we need is a play that will startle people, one that jabs in the gut. Right? Theatre of cruelty? I know it’s hard for a writer, but liberate yourself from the text and see what’s going on onstage. Okay?”

There was nothing for Jean-Baptiste to do but surrender; even though he couldn’t bring himself to feel right about it.

On opening night Marie volunteered to stay home and care for Mother so that Father might see the premiere of his son’s play with the rest of the family.

“I almost wish you wouldn’t come,” Jean-Baptiste said to them. “I think maybe it stinks.”

Father was excited, happy and proud. “If it stank, they wouldn’t put it on, would they?”

“Sure they would,” offered Uncle.

So Jean-Baptiste sat in the front row, with Uncle and Grandfather on one side, and Father and Aline on the other. He was trembling as the audience took their seats: people actually showed up. Then he realized, of course, all the actors have family too. By the time the lights went down, he was soaking wet.

As the curtain rose a light appeared in the upper left corner of the stage, glowing yellowly. It grew brighter until the audience recognized it as a cross shining down from a mountain. The set was in forced perspective and looked as much like something from
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
as anything the audience perceived as a local geographical feature. From stage right two characters appeared, dressed in rags, bent over from the effort of pulling behind them a large chest, which might even have been a coffin. One carried a sack, the other a spade.

Grandfather’s heart squeezed itself; Uncle hissed in the darkness. Father shifted uncomfortably, and Aline burst into sobbing tears. The rest of the audience assumed she was supplying atmosphere.

A sinking feeling developed in Jean-Baptiste’s stomach.

Onstage, the two characters were silent. The chest was obviously genuinely too heavy for them to lift. It scraped across the stage and up the painted set; the actors were struggling, breathing heavily.

The closer they got to the top, the steeper the slope became, and the narrower the path they could take. It was, after all, not really a mountain but only a low sloping platform. The painted perspective began to look ridiculous: the chest didn’t really get any smaller or further away. Finally, the huge box dwarfed the tiny shining cross. With a last desperate effort, the two actors pushed the chest over the crest of the hill. The audience heard the bulbs smashing as the light disappeared.

In the darkness, finally, an actor spoke:

“What was in it, anyway?”

“Nothing. It was empty.”

“Why was it so heavy, then?”

“I don’t know.”

When the lights came up again, Father was no longer quite so proud. It had nothing to do with whether the play was any good or not. As far as that went, Father’d hardly noticed. But how could Jean-Baptiste have mocked his family so?

How could he have paraded them in front of the public? How dare he?

Father turned to Jean-Baptiste beside him. “What the hell is this?”

In act two, civil war had broken out. A barricade had been thrown up to protect what might be a hospital, a government building or even a prison. The actors
were using real guns loaded with blanks, and the audience was going deaf. Styrofoam bricks were flying back and forth when the hero appeared, crawling, holding up a white cloth, waving it about as he approached the line of defence. The defenders ignored it, shooting wildly at him, pelting him with whatever came to hand. Since the props didn’t harm him, he made it to the barricade and climbed over. Atop, he was met by a defender who held him back.

“You’re not crossing this line, brother,” he declared in a thick French accent.

“But I must get through. My mother’s dying!”

“Don’t worry. No one dies in English here.”

At the end of act three the splinter group of murdering terrorists, who had been robbing graves to support the revolution, were now trapped by the police. When they began to fight among themselves, Woland himself, dressed as the devil and laughing maniacally, rode in a flying canoe across the stage and rained turds down on them as the curtain dropped.

The Desouches sat staring wordlessly at the stage as the actors took their bows and the audience politely applauded. They rose and shuffled out without comment. They wouldn’t look at Jean-Baptiste, and made their way out of the theatre without caring whether he joined them or not. He followed behind worriedly, like a chastised dog afraid of being abandoned.