Blackbird Window Collision and Funeral at the Birthday Breakfast

A blackbird’s fatal collision interrupts Hermann’s fortieth-birthday breakfast and turns a morning of adult resolutions into a child’s encounter with death and its rituals. The bird’s funeral, staged in the family’s pet cemetery, veers from an elaborate proposal to scatter its ashes to a hurried burial. In that shift, the children’s comic improvisation gives way to real mourning, and the narrator’s careful attention to the dead bird makes the episode more than a family anecdote.

The Collision at Breakfast

The incident comes during a breakfast charged with expectation. Hermann has announced that he will smoke his last cigarette in front of his family. He savors it as though it were extraordinarily good, while the others watch in silence. As he draws his final puff, a sharp bang breaks the stillness. The narrator briefly imagines that his father has exploded; in fact, a bird has struck the living-room window. Such collisions have happened before, but never at breakfast, and never with such force against a room held in suspense.

The shock scatters everyone’s attention. Hermann spits the cigarette onto the tablecloth, his wife makes a strangled sound, and the dog springs up and knocks its head beneath the table. The brothers and the narrator jerk back in their chairs. While the others hurry toward the window, the narrator remains fixed on the glowing cigarette ember. Hermann wets his little finger and touches the ash, which adheres to its saliva-damp tip as a yellow-orange point of light. He then puts the finger in his mouth and draws it out clean. The child watches, unable to tell whether this is a trick or an act of eating fire. Outside, the ember’s hue seems to match the blackbird’s bright yellow-orange beak, linking the domestic spectacle to the body lying beyond the glass.

The family finds the bird on the warm terrace stones, one wing stretched flat and its eyes closed. The middle brother, who hopes to become a doctor like Hermann, offers a confident medical diagnosis; father and son briefly play at being colleagues. Hermann cautions against touching the bird and suggests that its neck may be broken. Their mother fetches a shoebox lined with a kitchen towel, and the family carefully lifts the blackbird inside. The narrator is already sure that it is dead: its stillness seems final, not a temporary passage between death and life.

A Family’s Funeral Work

By midday the blackbird is taken to the family’s pet cemetery. It is already crowded with the remembered dead: the eldest brother’s finches and ornamental fish, a gecko found mummified behind a cupboard, and other birds that, like this one, struck the window. The children have established roles at these burials. The middle brother delivers the eulogies, the narrator carries the small bodies laid on handkerchiefs, and the eldest brother makes the wooden crosses. The work is familiar, but the weight of the dead repeatedly surprises the narrator: the blackbird weighs almost nothing, as though its carrier were holding empty hands out to beg.

For this funeral, the middle brother proposes an exception to the cemetery’s usual practice. He rejects the thought of the bird rotting underground and argues that a creature accustomed to the open air should be cremated, its feather-light ashes scattered to the wind. The eldest brother joins in, and the boys build a small, neat pyre from branches and dry grass, making a hollow that looks to the narrator like a soft nest. They set firelighters inside. Even as the plan takes shape, the narrator worries that they may not have waited long enough and imagines the bird waking in the flames and flying away on fire. The brothers’ joking confidence cannot settle that fear.

Their mother interrupts on her way to hang laundry. At first the boys form a wall in front of the pyre; when she sees the firelighters and asks whether they mean to set the bird alight, the middle brother answers by defending cremation and pressing her to consider what should happen to her own body after death. The argument momentarily turns a child’s funeral into a discussion of the mother’s eventual burial. She does not take up the question. She says that the children will not burn a bird in the garden on their father’s fortieth birthday: burial is acceptable, but cremation is not.

Burial, Eulogy, and Grief

The mother resumes hanging the laundry while keeping an eye on the boys. The eldest brother goes for a spade, and the narrator removes the firelighters from the nest-shaped pyre. Between the rows of graves, the eldest brother chooses a suitable place and digs a hole so small that one thrust of the spade is enough. The middle brother gives the blackbird a formal, accusing eulogy. He imagines the hardships of its life and praises it as a familiar companion, although the narrator recognizes that much of the speech is made up. Its force comes not from factual accuracy but from the seriousness with which the brother performs his appointed role.

The speech ends by blaming their mother for preventing the bird’s imagined wish to be given to the air. Her response is practical: she continues hanging wet clothes. The brothers applaud, and the narrator lets the bird slide from the handkerchief into the miniature grave. As he pushes the earth together with his hands, sorrow arrives against his will. He lowers his head close to the mound and pats the soil carefully, partly to gain time while trying to suppress his tears. The eldest brother tells him to stop drumming on the grave, calling it a disturbance of the dead. The narrator wipes his face on his shoulders without being noticed, and the eldest brother plants a wooden cross.

The narrator asks what the family should sing. The middle brother suggests a familiar bird song, and the three brothers sing until they no longer know how to continue. They return indoors feeling, in the narrator’s comparison, as though they have come back from church. The ritual is both makeshift and consequential: a box and a handkerchief have carried the bird from the terrace to the grave, while the children’s roles and the cross have made their farewell legible to one another. The failure to carry out the cremation does not prevent the burial from becoming a genuine act of mourning.

Death and Ritual Beyond the Garden

The episode belongs to a wider pattern in the narrator’s account of childhood, where funerals are at once ordinary family practice and occasions for improvisation. The pet cemetery’s previous occupants give the blackbird’s burial a history; the brothers have learned how to divide the work, yet each death can prompt a new ceremony. Here, the proposed pyre, the mother’s veto, the eulogy, the cross, and the song pull the children between play and reverence. The narrator’s tears mark the point at which the performance no longer protects him from the loss it is meant to order.

That tension also echoes the narrator’s Christmas visits through the psychiatric hospital with Hermann, then its director. The child remembers the patients’ intense excitement at receiving presents, and the yearly nativity play, whose performances could end in disorder even as the patients played their roles with force. In both settings, ritual offers a structure for an experience that resists neat control. The backyard funeral, however, remains intimate and family-made: there is no institution to manage the moment, only the boys, their mother, a tiny grave, and a dead bird.

Much later, at Hermann’s death, the narrator again attends closely to the body and to the question of where suffering goes. He sees his father’s face relaxed after the pain and fear have left it, and wonders about the pain that had consumed him. The blackbird funeral does not explain that later grief, but it establishes an early pattern of looking closely at death, handling the dead, and searching for a form of farewell. At the birthday breakfast, the decisive change is small and abrupt: a crack against glass ends the family’s solemn attention to a last cigarette, and the children must make a funeral for a life that has ended without warning.