Image: Unsplash, downloaded (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-bird-flying-over-a-persons-hand-with-a-building-in-the-background-xI5VYlM0WeI) 8. 11. 2024.
Bird Lady
She sat on the park bench, tossing crumbs about her as hundreds of pigeons gathered at her feet. The first time my wife and I saw the bird lady was during a walk through the park in Budapest, the summer my son was born.
We liked everything about city life with a toddler. In fact, we felt primed to like it. We had attended a poetry reading at an English literary club a few months after we knew we were expecting. The guest speaker was a poet, a native New Yorker, touring through Central Europe promoting her poetry collection. She read one of her pieces from when her daughter was young. She described standing on a busy street corner in Brooklyn, allowing the sound of the traffic to lull her baby to sleep. My wife and I looked at each other and mouthed the words, “We’re doing that.”
The weeks following the June day my son was born were typical warm summer days in Hungary. We lived on the third floor of our apartment building and gladly left the windows of his bedroom open night and day. He began sleeping through the night after six weeks, and we told ourselves it was because of the sounds…the noise of the tram, the clatter of the garbage truck three times a week, the siren of the fire engine from the station up the block, and the barking of countless city dogs.
Daily trips to the neighborhood park immediately became part of our routine. I walked my son in his stroller during the late morning hours while my wife caught up on her sleep. It was during one of those first walks when I noticed the bird lady. This was in Budapest’s 11th district, a leafy section of the city that touched the Danube on its eastern side and spread outward to the western tips of the southern half of the city. She lived in one of the neighboring buildings that framed the outside of the park, a multi-use slice of urban nature with tennis courts, walking paths, and a central pond. She sat at the same bench each time, just before noon, where the pigeons were already waiting for her. She cooed at them as she tossed the crumbs.
At first, we only exchanged smiles as I passed by with the stroller each morning, but eventually I struck up a conversation with her. She told me she was retired and had plenty of time to feed the birds. Her apartment was too small for pets, but as a girl growing up in her small village in southern Hungary, she had two dogs and three cats. I asked her how much money she spent every week on bread for the pigeons. She chuckled and said it was all free. She had an arrangement with the local bakery, and the owner gave her his leftover stale bread from the day before.
“That must help,” I said. “You feed so many each day.”
She smiled and said, “I have names for most of them. They’re my neighbors.”
In the subsequent years as my son grew, we continued coming to the park. My son graduated from the stroller to handholding as he learned to walk and eventually, to the small bike we bought him when he turned three. The “Bird Lady” was part of his early vocabulary, and he carefully walked his bike around the gathering of pecking pigeons so as not to frighten them off.
She told us she was one of the fortunate ones of Hungary’s elderly population. She was grandfathered into her flat, because it was owned by the Hungarian company she worked for during the waning years of the 1980s socialist era. Plenty in this older generation of Hungarian citizens were left behind when the country moved toward capitalism in the 90s. Her retirement, however, was well-timed to benefit from a fairly decent pension, and she also received fresh fruits and vegetables a few times a month from her younger cousins who still lived in the countryside.
“Now I finally have time to sit and rest,” she said.
Eventually our family moved back home to Minnesota, and I forgot about her. It wasn’t until last summer, when I took a trip back to Budapest…I wondered if she was still around. I laced up my sneakers one morning for a jog and headed in the direction of the park. As I got closer to the familiar bench, I slowed. There she was, a bit older, a bit slower, but still smiling and tossing crumbs. Still surrounded by hundreds of grateful birds.
Previously published in Thirty West.
About the Author: Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete
Comentarios