Birds Without Wings by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online Page B

dust left behind them the winding track of a river or a snake.
    The boys sat up and watched him approach with a mixture of fascination and fear. They jumped to their feet with the single idea that they should run away, but there was something about the man’s demeanour that prevented them. It was as if they were in no danger because the man did not live in the same world, and would not even see them.
    Indeed, perhaps he did not see them. He was tall and very thin, with spindly legs that were nonetheless tautly muscled from his years of walking, and he was clad only in a ragged scrap of grey sheet with a hole torn out for his head, and which at front and back hardly attained the level of his knees. He had a length of ship’s rope about his waist, the weight of whose knot at the front barely preserved his decency. One could see clearly the sides of his buttocks, and occasionally there were dark hints of his genitals as he walked.
    His arms were as thin and sinewy as his legs, and his fingers were long and spatulate. In his right hand he grasped a quarterstaff of well-worn ash, and with this he helped to propel himself along at his unnatural speed. His left hand rested upon the neck of a black-and-white goatskin water flagon, which was suspended on a leather thong that ran diagonally down across his chest.
    The tattered man was oblivious. He looked neither right nor left, with eyes that were lightest blue, like those of a Frank from the far north. His full head of disordered grey hair was knotted and matted, caked with dust, and the sweat of his brow ran down from it, leaving clean tracks across the filth that had accumulated upon his shrunken and aquiline face. With every step he groaned inarticulately, as if in conquerable pain, a groan such as one hears from a madman, or from a deaf man who has never learned to speak. These vocalisations, it seemed, were his marching song.
    He swept past the two boys, and they, as of one mind, followed him, mimicking his erratic stride and giggling to each other, timidly at first, but then with greater boldness, as the man who was the object of their mirth ignored them altogether.
    They approached the lower end of the town, and soon the procession grew as more children tagged along behind, in order to experience the novelty of imitating the extraordinary man. Fat little pug-nosed Drosoula, the exquisite Philothei, Ibrahim, son of Ali the Broken-Nosed, who even at that age was already following Philothei everywhere, and Gerasimos, son of the fisherman Menas, who was already feeling a fascination for Drosoula, all joined the happy ragtaggle of mockers and mimics, attracting also the town’s stray dogs, which barked senselessly, prancing at theedges of the procession, which before long numbered perhaps fifteen or twenty children.
    The people who had remained in the town, rather than gone to harvest tobacco, raisins and figs, came to their doors and gazed in wonder at the wild man and his retinue. Some women snatched their children away, but these were soon replaced by new ones. The men at the coffeehouses stopped their games of backgammon, and came out into the streets, their fat cigarettes clamped in their lips, and their fezzes at individual angles upon their heads. They stroked their stubble in amusement, or twisted the ends of their hyperbolical moustachios, exchanging amused smiles and wry comments, shrugging their shoulders, and then returning to their idleness. They had seen more than a few itinerant beggars in their time, although very few kept their eyes on the distance as this man did, as if he were at the helm of a ship whose crew was thirsty for land. One might think that at some time this man had been important, and had never lost his habit of lordly foresight and indifference.
    Through the narrow walkways he went, pausing for nothing, even striding over the back of a recumbent camel that had obstinately blocked the route, placing his foot at the base of its neck, and causing it