Translation revised by Catherine Howard
To all the children who such as I do not understand
The statues who live inside churches
I have never believed in angels.
I do believe in people and in birds. If they’re separate. But I have never been quite sure about those wings with endless feathers glued to the backs of men carved in stones and kept in the nooks of churches.
All those sculptures with wings always seemed too still, with no place to go. I did not think that was any good. Neither for the wings glued to the person nor for the person glued to the wings.
For me, angels were God’s inventions that did not work out and were put aside.
As if, one fine day, someone in a garage tried to attach a pair of wheels to a surfboard. After the surgery, he saw that the board was no longer good for the waves and the wheels were no longer good for the streets. So the wheeled surfboard was left in some corner, behind some post, like the angels in churches. Whenever someone passed by it, he wondered: “Does it run? Or does it float?”
In my mind, angels were a contraption: a bird that does not sing glued to a person with his feet off the ground.
Until one day, I met an angel and I found out why they are such a blend of birds and people.
It happened when I was little. At the school where I studied, a boy from Macedonia arrived. He spoke a language no one understood
We were not friends. In fact, the Little Macedonian did not have any playmates at school.
During every recess, he ran to the playground and sat on the last swing. There he remained through the entire break. Alone, mumbling words that seemed invented. He had short legs that barely let him to touch the ground. So he mumbled his words, swinging his legs.
Right in front of the Macedonian's swing stood a yellow slide. One day, a sparrow landed on this slide, and the Little Macedonian started a conversation with it.
“What is your name, little bird? My name is Sasko and I come from Macedonia. What about you? Where are you from?”
The sparrow, familiar with neither Macedonian nor any other language, left these questions unanswered. The bird bent its little head to one side, then the other, and there it remained, looking at the sky, waiting for the wind to change direction. Meanwhile Sasko kept speaking his invented words.
Did someone invent those words for Sasko to learn by heart? Or did he make them up by improvising?
“I wish I had wings like yours; I would fly back to Macedonia. But all I can do is swing a little bit because my legs can barely reach the ground”.
Sasko looked to the side and saw the other children swinging very high, pushed by their friends. They yelled, “Higher! Higher!” But Sasko did not understand what they were repeating. It seemed odd, but Sasko played alone and the tip of his toes barely scratched the sand.
“Could you teach me how to fly, little bird? Would you push my swing if you were a boy like me?” The sparrow did not answer. It turned its little head and paid attention to the wind.
The Little Macedonian was engrossed in this monologue when another boy approached and asked, “Do you want me to push your swing?” Since Sasko only spoke Macedonian, he did not understand a single word of the offer. The Little Macedonian shrugged, for words can have many meanings, good ones and bad ones; it is not always easy to tell.
The other boy gave a gentle push on Sasko’s swing and the Little Macedonian smiled. A smile is something everybody understands.
The new friend kept pushing and Sasko said: “Look little bird! I am flying just like you!” The boy did not understand a word of what Sasko said.
It was all fun at first, but the other child was not a good friend; he was a boy with the thorn of cruelty stuck in his heart. Between one push and another, he decided to scare the Little Macedonian and started pushing the swing harder and harder.
In the beginning, Sasko enjoyed it and said, “Look little bird! I have wings too!” But soon he became scared as the other boy pushed the swing too hard, making it go higher and faster than the Macedonian could bear.
The Little Macedonian’s hands gripped the swing’s chains and started to sweat, slipping a little with every push.
Every time the swing swept near the ground, Sasko could almost feel the sand grains rise. An emptiness seemed to fill his stomach. It was frightening to have wings.
The boy pushing the swing started to wonder when Sasko would scream and how loudly he would scream out of fear.
Sasko became so panicked that he could not breathe. Sometimes he felt his body lose contact from the swing. He tried to stretch his legs a bit and touch the ground, but any movement made him feel as if he were about to fall. The chains creaked a lot. The other boy continued pushing.
Every time the boy’s hands touched the swing, Sasko felt he was going to lose balance. The chains rattled as his little hands clutched the iron shackles.
The Little Macedonian wanted to scream, but he was petrified by fear. His body was overcome with chills. The other boy kept wondering what his cruelty might provoke in the Little Macedonian.
Drawing extra strength from inside, the Little Macedonian managed to scream: “Stop! Stop!” His eyes were filled with tears.
The other boy, however, did not understand Macedonian; noticing that Sasko was scared, he pushed the swing even harder, for the thorn of cruelty was stuck in his heart. He was happy to hear Sasko screaming.
A tear trickled across Sasko’s face, but it flew away because the swing was moving too fast and the wind was starting to blow. It was a wind coming from afar and the sparrow foresaw its arrival.
The sparrow turned its little head one more time and, sensing that the wind would change direction, took a step to the side.
Sasko could not seeor hear the other boy, but he could feel the smile of cruelty growing on his face. A wide and large smile it was, one that, with every push of the swing, took over the boy’s face. The smile grew so much that, at a certain point, it seemed the whole boy was little more than a smile and two hands pushing the swing.
This boy with a thorn in his heart did not notice Sasko crying. He thought the swing was still too slow and too low, so he pushed it once more, only this time the wind turned and gave him a hand. Sasko went so high and so fast that the chains holding the swing broke apart.
The swing was thrown far away and shattered against the slide where the little bird had landed. The noise was ear-splitting. The chains rattled through the air for a long time before they landed, for the wind now blew stronger than ever.
The wind was now a gale that scared all the children away from the playground.
The boy with a thorn pricked in his heart looked around for Sasko. He was curious. He wanted to know where the Little Macedonian had fallen. He wanted to see if Sasko was hurt and if he was crying at last. He was more curious than the wind that muddled everything.
He looked around but he could not find the Little Macedonian. He wandered by the broken swing and near the seesaw, but saw nothing. And while he searched for for him, he wondered: “What is going to happen after Sasko cries?”
He searched a little longer until he saw something under the yellow slide. The wind swirled the sand grains
in the air, making it hard to see. By getting closer, he could see the sparrow lying there.Taking a good look at it, he noticed the bird had Sasko’s face. Sprinkled on the sand beside the bird were the Little Macedonian’s teardrops.
And when he saw the tears, the boy’s curiosity was satisfied: “So Sasko did cry.”
What was going to happen after he cried?
After Sasko cried, there was no more Sasko and there was no more swing. The words on the playground were the same again. There were no more invented words, nor any new words. The friendless Macedonian was no more, nor was there any friend he could never have.
The thorn that poked the boy’s heartrotted and fell out. The smile of cruelty that had inhabited his face disappeared and it became possible to see his features.
It was not a cruel face; it was a sad face.
Sasko had wings, but he could not fly. He was neither a boy nor a bird. He was an angel, an artifice God placed in the world to help the other boy who had a thorn pricking his heart.
THE END
