The Spectator Bird Read Online Free PDF

up, avoiding Ruth’s questioning look, and went out into the wind and down to the study. In the third album I looked through, I found it—a snapshot Ruth had taken of Karen Blixen sitting under a tree in her garden at Rungstedlund. Under her old garden hat her face was bird-sharp, leather-skinned. She was tiny, shrunken, her eyes as alive as snakes: as surely a witch as any old woman in one of her tales. In her hand she was holding a rune stone she had dug up only a few minutes before we arrived, and on her face was a look of glee, a smugness of secret knowledge, as if the murky world she visited every night on her broomstick had just sent her, in the cryptic markings on the stone, a daylight message that only she and her wizard and warlock friends could read. Sure enough, she looked like Rødding, and even more like that mummy of his. The same smile.
    Which should not surprise me. Karen Blixen was a baroness, and related to Astrid and Astrid’s brother. From all I ever saw of the Danish nobility, they are all cousins; they have been marrying one another for so long they look as much alike as so many Airedales. Still, it was a little spooky to have that lovely, subtle Danish writer looking back at me out of the snapshot with the same knowing, Old World smile that I had seen twenty years before on the face of a Bronze Age mummy from a peat bog.
    I closed the study and went back. There was a big wind up. The live oak sawed and groaned, and the light fastened to its trunk glared up into threshing shadows. Petals from the wild plums in the woods below blew across the lighted dome of the tree. Going up the path was like being pounded from behind by pillows, and the wind tried to take the door away from me as I opened it. I came inside in a flurry of wind, fine rain, and plum blossoms. Ruth lowered her book to her lap and looked at me and laughed. Then she just sat there watching me like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother-white hair, spectacles, Groucho Marx eyebrows, amused house-detective eyes.
    â€œWhere’d you go?”
    â€œDown to the study.”
    â€œWhat for?”
    â€œLook something up.”
    â€œSounds as if the storm’s finally coming in.”
    â€œBig wind. Not much rain yet.”
    A moment’s silence, the widening smile. “You going to read some more now?”
    â€œI thought I might. Why?”
    â€˜ “Then you’d better wipe the flowers off your glasses.”
    I removed my glasses and wiped the plum blossoms off and settled back down in the chair. She kept watching me.
    â€œWhat is this you’re reading so interestedly?”
    I was already wishing I’d left the notebooks in the study, where I could have read them in the morning in privacy. I didn’t suppose there was anything in them that couldn’t be read to Ruth, because I am not a confider, even in myself. Nevertheless, ever since that postcard had showed up in the mail, I had had a half-irritable sense of wanting to be alone with what it revived.
    â€œPapers,” I said.
    â€œWhat papers?”
    â€œWhat papers? What papers are there? The only papers, the files, the evidence. Allston was here.”
    â€œIt doesn’t look like letters.”
    â€œYou know why?” I said. “Because it isn’t. It’s a notebook- three notebooks.”
    â€œNotebooks about what?”
    â€œIt’s a journal. Diary.”
    â€œWhose? Where’d you get it?”
    â€œMine. I got it out of a cardboard carton.”
    â€œI mean who wrote it?”
    I settled deeper and found my place and became absorbed. “I did.”
    But she wasn’t letting me get away with that. When her curiosity is up she can read your genetic code with the naked eye. “Come on,” she said. “You don’t keep a journal.”
    â€œI did this time.”
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œDenmark.”
    â€œDenmark?”
    I was getting a little exasperated at the