The Jackdaw

by Hermann Hesse

translated by Michael Wooff

For a long time now, whenever I have come back to Baden for a cure, I have not been prepared for surprises. The day will come when the last chunk of the Goldwand vineyards will have been built upon, and the fine sanatorium park will have been turned into a factory, but I won’t be there to see it. And yet this time, on the ugly slanted bridge that leads to Ennetbaden, a strange and delightful surprise awaited me.

I am in the habit, each day I’m here, of granting myself on this bridge, which is only a few steps away from the spa’s hotels, a few minutes of pure pleasure that consist in feeding gulls with bits of bread. They are not there at all times of day and, even when they are there, are not always there to be spoken to. There are times when they sit in a long row on the roof of the municipal thermal baths, watch the bridge and wait for one of the passers-by to stop, take bread from a pocket and throw it to them. The young gulls and the acrobats among them have a field day then.

If someone starts to throw bits of bread in the air to them, they stop to hover, as long as it gets them somewhere over the head of their bread donor. You can observe each one as an individual and ensure, as much as possible, that each gets its turn.

You are then surrounded by a deafening, roaring surge and lightning-fast movements, a swirling and chattering swarm of violent liveliness. You stand overwhelmed and wooed from all sides in a grey and white cloud of wings from which short, shrill cries issue incessantly.

There are, however, always a number of more reflective and less sporty seagulls that keep themselves at a distance from the turmoil and wheel in a leisurely manner down over the fast-flowing waters of the Limmat, where silence reigns and into which fall a piece of bread here, a piece of bread there, that have somehow escaped from the ever-competitive, acrobatic gulls above them.

At other times of day not a single gull can be seen here. Whether they have gone on a trip as a school or a group or whether they are being fed particularly generously further downstream, they have all disappeared. And then again, there are times when the seagull population is indeed about, but is neither squatting on roofs nor descending on the heads of those feeding it, but is swarming and making a lot of noise and getting excited densely packed above the river somewhat further on.

Waving or throwing bread helps not at all. They’re just not interested. They are busy with bird games and, perhaps, with human games, too, with assemblies, fights, voting, stocks, and shares, with who knows what. You could not entice them away from their exciting and important business and games even with baskets full of dainty morsels. This time, when I came to the bridge, a black bird was perched on the guard rail, a jackdaw of very small stature and, as it did not fly away as I came nearer, I sidled up to it more and more slowly, one short step at a time.

It showed neither fear nor mistrust, only interest and curiosity, and let me come within half a pace of it, looked me up and down with lively bird eyes and laid its head sprinkled with grey on its shoulder as if to say: “So, old man, you stand back in amazement at me!”

I was indeed amazed. This jackdaw was used to being around people. You could talk to him and already one or two people were walking past that knew him and greeted him with “Salut, Jacob!” I tried to question them and have since gathered many scraps of information about Jacob, not all of which agree. The principal question remained unanswered: where the jackdaw lived and how he had come to be on such familiar terms with us humans.

One person thought he was tame and belonged to a woman in Ennetbaden. Other people said that he wandered about where he pleased, sometimes flying through an open window into a room where he pecked at something edible or plucked to pieces a piece of knitting that was lying around. An extraneous visitor, who apparently knew a lot about birds, remarked that he belonged to a rare species of jackdaw which, as far as he knew, was seen only in the mountains near Freiburg and lived there among the rocks.

I then met the jackdaw Jacob nearly every day, sometimes alone, sometimes with my wife, said hello and talked to him. Once my wife was wearing shoes with a pattern cut into the uppers, the holes in which allowed glimpses of her stockings. These shoes, and above all these islets of stocking, interested Jacob a lot. He dropped to the ground, took aim with shining eyes, and pecked at them passionately.

Several times I had him sitting on my arm and on my shoulder. He pecked my coat and collar, my cheek and the back of my neck and tugged on the brim of my hat. He sets no great store by bread, but gets jealous and sometimes really angry if, with him there, it is being doled out to the seagulls. He takes nuts or peanuts from the hand of a donor skilfully with his beak.

But his favourite game is to peck, pluck, bash to pieces and destroy something. He stands on it with one of his feet and hacks at it quickly and impatiently with his beak, whether it be crumpled-up paper, the remains of a cigar or a piece of cardboard or fabric. And one feels, when he does it again, that it happens not just because he wants it to but because of the spectators, of whom he always gathers round him some and often many.

He hops about in front of them on the ground or on the railing of the bridge backwards and forwards, is pleased with his popularity, flutters over the head or the shoulder of a spectator, drops back to earth again, studies our shoes and pecks strongly at them. Pecking and plucking, tugging, and breaking are fun for him, and he performs these operations with roguish pleasure. But the general public comes into it too. It has to admire him, laugh at him, shout out, feel flattered by his proofs of friendliness, and then be frightened when he pecks at stockings, hats, and hands.

He does not fear in the least the seagulls, which are twice as big as he is and several times stronger. Sometimes he flies up high in the air in their midst. And they do not harm him. To begin with, he does not compete with them or spoil their sport, as he hardly touches bread and then he is, I imagine, a phenomenon to them, something rare and puzzling and slightly uncanny.

He is alone, he does not belong to a group nor listen to codes of behaviour, words of command or laws. He has left the jackdaw race where he was one of many and has turned instead to the human race, which is astonished at him and offers sacrifices to him that he does justice to as a clown and a tightrope walker when it suits him. He rejoices over them and he cannot get enough of an audience’s admiration.

Black, insolent, and solitary, he sits amidst bright gulls and variegated humans, the only one of his kind, without a nation and without a home either by fate or by his own will. Sharp-eyed and cheeky, he sits there, watches the coming and going on the bridge and takes pleasure in the fact that only a few passers-by hurry past without paying attention, that most of them stop a while because of him and often marvel at him for a long while, cudgel their brains over him, call him Jacob and only hesitatingly decide to move on. He does not take people more seriously than is fitting for a jackdaw, and yet it seems as though he cannot do without them.

When I found myself alone with him, which did not happen often, I was able to speak to him in a bird language I had partly learned, partly invented as a boy and a youth in familiar dealings with our parrot over a period of years. It consisted of a melodic sequence of guttural sounds. I bent towards Jacob in order to address him amicably half in bird-talk.

He cocked his fine head away from me, listened gladly and formulated his own thoughts on the matter, but, all of a sudden, the imp and the rascal resurfaced in him, and he swung himself onto my shoulder, held on tight and hammered his beak on my neck or my cheek with the persistence of a woodpecker till it got too much for me and I freed myself with one quick movement, at which he assumed a position opposite me on the railing, amused and ready for new games.

At the same time he strafed both sides of the pavement with quick glances, looking to see whether new people were coming and whether there were any new conquests to be made. He knew exactly where he was and what power he had over us big clumsy creatures. He enjoyed a lot his singularity and set-apartness in the middle of a foreign, unculled nation and, in his role as actor and tightrope-walker, being surrounded and overshadowed by giants who were either moved or laughing or in awe of him.

With me, at least, he had succeeded in making me attached to him and, when I came to look for him and did not find him, I was sad and disappointed as a result. I was more interested in him than I was in the majority of my fellow human beings. And no matter how much I valued the seagulls and liked their fine, wild, violent expressions of life, when they were fluttering round me, they were not individuals; they were a nation, a flock and if, by looking more closely, I could discern and admire one of them as a separate entity, I never recognized it again once it had slid out of my field of sight.

I will never know where and how Jacob became alienated from his own people and the safety conferred by numbers, whether he chose for himself his extraordinary fate as tragic as it is brilliant or whether it was forcibly imposed on him. The second course of action is more likely. Probably he was still quite young, perhaps injured or unfledged, had fallen out of the nest, had been found by humans and taken away by them, then cared for and brought up by them.

But our ability to fantasize is not always satisfied with the probable and gladly entertains the idea of remote and sensational possibilities. And so I thought up two other explanations apart from that probable one. It was conceivable or fantasizeable that this Jacob was a genius and, from early on, had been desirous of an abnormally high level of individuation and differentiation from other jackdaws, that he dreamed of achievements, successes and honours that did not figure in the life of jackdaws and that, as a race, they were ignorant of. And because of this, he grew to be an outsider and a singleton, flew the coop like Schiller’s young man and wandered alone until the world by some happy accident opened a door to him into the realm of the beautiful, the artistic, the famous, all of which prodigies dream of being from the outset.

The other possibility I dreamed up was this one: Jacob had been a ne’er-do-well, a little devil, a rascal, which being a genius does not exclude. With his cheeky thoughts and pranks, he had initially baffled and now and then delighted his father and mother, siblings and relations and finally the whole of his nation or certainly his immediate community. He had soon passed for a devil of a fellow and a wily bird, had grown cheekier and cheekier and had in the end so exasperated his home, his neighbours, his nation and his local government and turned them against him that he was solemnly banished from jackdaw society and driven into the wilderness like a scapegoat.

But people had met with him before he languished and died. He had overcome his natural fear of the clumsy giants, grown close to them, and joined them, and bewitched them with his liveliness and singularity, which he had long been conscious of, and had thus found the way to a town and the world of people and in it his place as a fun bird, an actor, a local attraction, and a wonder of nature.

He had become what he is today: the favourite of a wide public, an in-demand charmer of elderly women and men, a philanthropist as well as a misanthrope, a one-man show on a podium, the emissary of a strange world unknown to the clumsy giants, a clown to some, a dark warning to others, laughed at, applauded, loved, admired, pitied, a theatrical experience for all, a problem for the pensive.

We pensive ones — for, no doubt, there are many apart from me — direct our thoughts and suppositions, our knowledge-gathering and yarn-spinning techniques to more than just Jacob’s origin and past life. His appearance is so very conducive to fantasy that it forces us to give a good deal of consideration to his future. And we do this tentatively and with a feeling half of sorrow, half of foreboding, for our darling’s likeliest end will be a violent one.

Much as we would like to try to envisage a natural and peaceful death for him, perhaps in the warm room and care of that legendary woman in Ennetbaden he is supposed to “belong” to, the odds are against it. A creature that has forsaken freedom and its wild state and left the safety of its tribe and surroundings to thrive among people and live in a civilized environment may have adapted superlatively well and be fully aware of all the advantages of its unique position, but this position conceals countless dangers that it is difficult to escape from. One shudders when one starts to dwell on these fearsome dangers, from an electric shock to being locked in a room with a cat or a dog or being captured and tortured by cruel children.

There are accounts of peoples in prehistoric times who each year chose or drew lots for a king for themselves. Then a handsome, nameless, and poor youth, a slave perhaps, was suddenly clothed in splendid apparel and raised to the status of a king. A palace or stately tent received him, servants to serve him, beautiful women, a kitchen, a cellar, royal stables, and an orchestra; the whole fairy tale of royalty, power, wealth, and splendour became a reality for the chosen one. So the new ruler lived through festive days and weeks and months until a year was up. Then he was bound, led to a place of execution, and killed.

I sometimes ended up thinking of this story I had read once decades ago, this shining and dreadful, fairy-tale beautiful and deadly story, the credibility of which I had neither the opportunity nor desire to verify, when I looked at Jacob pecking peanuts out of ladies’ hands, reprimanding a child’s being silly with a poke of his beak, listening to my parrot talk with interest and somewhat patronizingly or picking to pieces a paper cup from a flower bed in front of delighted spectators. As he did so, he held it down with the talons on one of his feet while his obstinate head and the grey ruffled feathers on top of it seemed to express simultaneously anger and pleasure.