Read To the Wedding for Free Online

basement on Stachanovska Street to collect piles of samizdat. At the bottom of the staircase today a man is whistling. She knocks on a door and the whistling stops.
    Who’s there?
    Zdena Holecek
    Gome in, Citizen.
    She hasn’t heard the word
Citizen
, as a form of public address, since the frontiers were open. She wrinkles her nose as if to reply to a bad joke, and opens the door on to a carpenter’s shop, large and well lit. Sitting at the benches are two men in blue overalls. The elder of them has a watchmaker’s eyeglass on an elastic around his forehead.
    A friend told me, says Zdena, that you make bird-calls?
    Take a seat. We make bird-calls, says the older man. We now have thirty-three species.
    Do you by any chance have a thrush?
    Which kind were you thinking of? A Mistle Thrush or a Siberian? A Bluethroat or a Red-winged Thrush?
    A Song Thrush like the ones in the trees now.
    You understand, Citizen, why we make our instruments? They should never be used as decoys for capturing or killing members of the species. We ask every buyer to remember this, and in every box there is a printed notice which says: “I use bird-calls to speak to birds!” I began as a philosophy student. Marek here played in a jazz group. After years of reflection we became convinced that making bird-calls was the least harmful thing we could do in this world—which would at the same time permit us to live.
    Do you sell many?
    We export all over the world, says the young Marek. Our next experiment is with the Kiwi Bird for New Zealand. In Marek’s eyes, as he speaks, there is fanaticism. The thrush population in Slovakia is diminishing, did you know that, Citizen?
    I want to give one to my daughter.
    We have two models. One is a chirper, the other melodic.
    Would it be possible for me to hear them?
    The one in a blue coat, who was a philosopher, goes to a cupboard and comes back with two small, homemade wooden boxes with sliding lids. He opens one and holds itout to Zdena. Inside is an implement—no larger than an egg cup—which looks like a cross between a tiny car horn with a rubber bulb for honking and a miniature apparatus for giving enemas. At the opposite end to the rubber, there is a metal tube with a little hole like a flute stop and a metal fin that runs along the inside of the tube.
    Hold it in your left hand and bang the rubber, Citizen, with your right hand.
    Zdena places her handbag on the chair and stands up to perform. As her right palm strikes the rubber and squashes it, the air forced into the tube makes a chirp that could only come from a thrush’s beak. She strikes repeatedly and closes her eyes. Eyes shut, she finds, as I do, the sounds unmistakably true, as if they really came from the syrinx, the voice-box of a thrush.
    Meanwhile, Marek has taken the other instrument out of its box. It is shaped like a very small wineglass and made of solid wood except for a slender hollow pipe which runs through the stem of the glass to the level of its rim. He cups it in one of his large hands and puts the stem to his lips. Inhaling or exhaling through the miniature windpipe, his breath becomes liquid birdsong. Zdena stops, hand in mid-air, eyes shut. Marek pauses. Zdena strikes the black rubber again. Marek replies. And so, in a basement on Stachanovska Street, with chirps and trills, Marek and Zdena begin a thrush duet.
    Why do you want to give it to her? asks the one with an eyeglass, when the pair stop playing.
    A thrush sings outside my house every morning and Ihope your invention will—how can I say?—speak to the thrush in my daughter’s head!
    They can bring comfort. That’s why we make them …
    Ninon, let’s walk, Gino says to me. We go towards Grezzana, Gino knows roads which nobody else does. It’s uncanny. He can get from one city to another without once crossing a Strada Statale. Later I called him Hare because of his face and his long nose and I was right to do so for he knows paths which nobody else can see,