by Urmuz (b. 17 martie 1883, Curtea de Argeș - d. 23 noiembrie 1923, București)
Algazy is an old, loveable, toothless, smiling old man; his beard is shaven and silky, beautifully displayed on a grid, screwed up under his chin and enclosed with barbed wire…
Algazy does not speak any European language… If you wait for him, however, at dawn, when day breaks, and tell him: “Good morning, Algazy,” stressing the sound z, Algazy will smile and, in order to manifest his gratitude, will put his hand into his pocket and pull the end of a rope, which makes his beard jump with joy for half an hour… Unscrewed from its place the grid helped him solve any problems related to the peace and cleaning of his household…
Algazy will not take any bribe… He only once lent himself to such a deed, when he worked as a copyist for the parish church; even then, he did not take any money, but only a couple of pot fragments, as he wanted to give them as dowry to some poor sisters of his who were all getting married the next day.
Algazy’s greatest pleasure – except his usual business at the shop – is to harness himself of his own will to a wheel-barrow and – followed about two metres behind by his co-partner Grummer – to run at full speed on the dusty road, in the heat of the sun, through rural communes, their only purpose being to collect old rags, pierced oil tins and especially anklebones that they then eat together, after midnight in the ghastliest silence…
Grummer also has a scented wooden beak…
Having an uncommunicative nature and a bilious temperament, he will spend the entire day lying under the counter, his beak thrust under the floor, through a hole.
On entering his shop, a delicious smell tickles your nostrils… You are met at the stairs by an honest fellow who has green dyed cotton threads on his head instead of hair. Then you are greeted most politely by Algazy and invited to sit on a stool.
Grummer lies stalking… Looking aside, he first perfidiously takes out just his beak, which he ostentatiously rubs up and down a trough specially carved into the edge of the counter; then he shows up entirely… Using all sorts of cunning strategies he makes Algazy leave the shop, then he insidiously draws you unawares into all sorts of conversation – mainly about sports and literature – until the moment when, judging it convenient,
He hits you with his beak on the belly, making you scream with pain and run out in the street.
Algazy, who, because of this unacceptable behaviour of Grummer, almost always has some sort of trouble or argument with his customers runs out after you, invites you back into the shop, and, in order to offer you a well deserved compensation, gives you the right – provided you have bought something worth more than 15 pence – to… smell a little Gruber’s beak and, if you wish, to squeeze him by a gray rubber bladder that he wears fixed to his back, a little above his buttocks, which makes him jump about the shop without moving his knees, uttering inarticulate sounds…
One day, Grummer took the wheel barrow, without letting Algazy know about it, and set out in search of rags and anklebones, but on his return, finding by accident some poetic leftovers, pretended he was ill and furtively ate them alone under the quilt… Algazy, suspecting that, came after him with the honest intention of giving him a short moralizing lecture, but noticed, to his awe, in Grummer’s stomach, that all valuable literature that had been left had been eaten up and digested.
Thus deprived of any choice nourishment, Algazy ate Grummer’s bladder in compensation for the loss, while the latter was sleeping…
The following day, Grummer, desperate to have remained alone in the world now that his bladder was gone, took the old man in his beak, and furiously flew him to the peak of a high mountain after sunset… A giant fight started there between the two, which lasted overnight until, towards daybreak, Grummer, defeated, offered to return all the literature he had swallowed up.
He puked it in Algazy’s hands… But the old man, in whose belly the ferments of the bladder he had swallowed had started to generate the thrills of the literature of the future, found that what was on offer was too little and dated…
Starved and unable to find in the dark the ideal nourishment they both needed so much, they resumed their fight with increased energy and, under the pretext of tasting each other just for better complementing and knowing each other, they started biting into each other furiously, until they gradually consumed each other, and got to the last bone… It was Algazy who finished first…
EPILOGUE
The following day, at the foot of the mountain, the passers by could notice, washed down by the rain, a grid with barbed wire and a smelly wooden beak… The authorities were informed, but before they got there, one of Algazy’s wives, who was broom-shaped, suddenly appeared and… moving once or twice to the left and right, swept everything it found into the dustbin.
credits
from Văzduh,
released May 3, 2013
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