Page 69 - I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

“It’s the school gardener,” my wife said.
“Impossible!” I shouted. “The school gardener is just an old woman. How
could she be so heavy? That thing is like an elephant. Look! The old poplar tree
has been crushed and three branches were broken!”
My wife said nothing. She was deep in thought, her expression absentminded.
Maybe it really was the school gardener. Her hat had fallen under the tree.
Maybe she was a shapeshifter.

I flew several times toward the playground, but didn’t see her. Probably she
had really retired.
Our nest sustained a little damage, but we repaired it. The people living in the
tile houses were quiet in the daytime: they went into the city quietly and returned
quietly. On weekends, the women washed clothes, and the men dug some holes
behind the houses, but we didn’t see them sow any seeds. My wife eventually
joined them. Strutting, she landed on their table and on their stove. I shivered for
her.
These people still acted viciously toward me. When I tried to get close to
them, they looked as if they were saying there was no need for me to exist in this
world. I despaired.
I began to miss the skinny woman from the pool in the small garden. Where

had she gone? How could she have disappeared without a trace? She evidently
wasn’t a teacher in the school, and she wasn’t part of this group of people. Could
it be that she lived in the city?
In the middle of the night, the houses caught fire, perhaps because someone
had made too much of a disturbance and knocked over an oil lamp, igniting
something flammable. This seemed the most likely to me. It was a magnificent
sight: my wife and I perched on a poplar twig and took it all in. The
conflagration turned half the sky red; even the school classrooms were
illuminated. How could the fire be so big? It was as if people had dumped a
large quantity of kerosene into the fire. Even harder to understand was that no
one escaped. We didn’t see even one person on the road. My wife and I smelled
scorched flesh. We were shaking. For some reason, we had an urge to fly into
the fire, but we restrained ourselves.
An hour passed, and then another hour. The fire was still roaring. What was
happening? The fire kept changing. At first, it was golden yellow, then red, and
at last—three or four hours later—an eerie greenish-blue. I don’t know where

the flames came from, soaring so high. I suddenly had an idea: I was so scared
that I fell down under the tree, because my whole body was paralyzed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” my wife said softly beside me. “I’m thinking
the same thing. It must be corpses that are burning. What else could it be?”
I was speechless. I saw the raging flames and unexpectedly felt like crying.