Рассказ о попугае по англ. яз.

The Parrot Who Collected Voices

The parrot arrived on a Tuesday hidden inside a melon crate, its green tail sticking out between the slats like a flag that didn’t know which country it belonged to. I worked mornings at the harbor café, the one with the tin roof that rattled when the wind turned west, and I was the one who signed for deliveries when Mr. Santos ran to the bait shop. The label said FRUIT, but the crate clicked and muttered like a pocketful of marbles.

Inside sat a blue-fronted parrot with a brass leg band and eyes the color of tea after the third steeping. He looked at me, tilted his head, and—without so much as a hello—said, in a tone eerily like the ferry captain’s: “Mind the gap. Watch your toes.”

“You’re not a melon,” I told him.

He considered this. Then, perfectly imitating Mr. Santos, he declared, “Coffee’s on me if you can spell ‘macchiato’!”

We named him Buddy because everyone in town is either “Buddy” or “Pal” if you’re close enough to owe each other money. No one came to claim him the first day, nor the second. By the weekend, Buddy had become the café’s strangest employee. He perched near the tip jar and announced orders before I could pin them to the corkboard. “Two fried eggs, break the yolks, and a side of regret,” he’d say, stealing the last word from an old fisherman whose humor arrived saltier than his boots.

It didn’t take long to realize Buddy didn’t just mimic voices; he collected them. Exact pitch, exact pacing, a flourish at the end that told you who he was wearing. He wore the ferry captain in the mornings, Pastor Lu every Sunday at noon, and, when the high school let out, he put on Principal Vargas like a suit and called the kids “scholars,” obeyed by exactly none.

The first person to see something more than comedy in Buddy was Mrs. Lang from the lighthouse. Her husband had died two winters ago, the battery on his radio failing an hour before the rescue boats reached him. She came for tea and silence, and Buddy stayed quiet, as if he understood the coin she was paying with. Just as she stood to leave, Buddy lowered his head and said, so gently, so exactly, “Turn the lamp, Ellie. Turn the lamp.”

Mrs. Lang pressed both hands to the counter to keep from floating off the earth. “He used to say that,” she whispered to me. “When I got too busy to watch the light, he’d call from the porch: ‘Turn the lamp, Ellie.’ That voice. It’s him.”

After she left, Buddy hopped closer, eyes bright. “Turn the lamp,” he repeated, then switched to my own voice with a mischief that made me laugh and wince all at once: “You’re not a melon.”

Word spread. People started coming in not for coffee but for the chance that Buddy would take a voice off his invisible shelf and hand it back to them. He gave Mr. Santos his mother’s recipe for caldo verde—“Don’t drown the potatoes, Rui. Let them learn to swim.” He lent the mayor her father’s election-night joke—“If you can’t count, smile wider”—and made her cry into an omelet. Sometimes he offered nonsense, like “Keep the door at your back and the fog at your mercy,” which turned out to be a line from the harbor master who retired before I was born. Buddy had lived many lives, it seemed, or at least stood close enough to other people’s lives that their words rubbed off on him like paint.

There was one voice he never tried: my father’s. Folks in town remembered him as a man who could coax a motor awake with a screwdriver and a hum, but I remembered him as the caller ID that flickered during a storm and then didn’t, as the voicemail I never played. He’d been lost the year after I graduated. I had lined up jobs that kept me on land: coffee, keys, a drawer full of pens. On days when the bay was glass, the guilt crept in on cat feet. On days when the wind heaved and shoved, it arrived like a parade.

It was late autumn when the new ferry strip was painted, a straight white grin across the pier. The weather had gone from kind to honest, and the regulars came in with collars up and cheeks stung bright. Buddy spent more time watching the water. He learned the rhythm of the foghorns so well he could answer them with perfect intervals, which made the harbor dogs tilt their heads in chorus.

One evening, with the light already thin, a boy ran in yelling that a small sailboat was heading the wrong side of the channel marker. The harbor master was home sick. Mr. Santos grabbed the radio, but whatever number he needed lived in a drawer under a drawer, and he started pulling out takeout menus and rubber bands like that would help. My legs moved before my mind did. I grabbed the big flashlight from the broom closet and ran to the end of the pier, swinging the beam in a slow arc. The sailboat kept its stubborn line.

Behind me, Buddy launched from his perch and beat his wings in a clumsy but determined way toward the door. He reached the rooftop, then the sign, then me, landing on the pier rail with a wobble and a huff. He looked out at the boat, cocked his head, and in a voice I hadn’t heard since the day we scattered ashes off Point Bell, he said, “Starboard, kiddo. The right is your right. Trust your hand.”

The world folded. There he was—my father—without his boots or cap or the smell of diesel, but there all the same in a sentence he must have said a hundred times when he was teaching me to read the water. I didn’t cry; there wasn’t room. I cupped my hands and shouted, “Starboard! Your right! Trust your hand!” Buddy repeated it, louder, then added in the ferry captain’s voice, “Mind the gap!” which made no sense but somehow did: watch the space between mistake and correction.

The sailboat wavered, corrected, and slid into the safe tongue of the channel. When it finally docked, a college kid stepped off, white as flour. He kept saying, “I knew it was my right, but the wind—” Mr. Santos slipped him a hot chocolate and the kind of lecture you only get from people who want to see you again next week.

Later, after the rush of adrenaline collapsed into the quiet clink of cups, I sat on the pier with Buddy. He preened his feathers with the seriousness of a jeweler. “Where did you hear him?” I asked, my voice trying to sound like casual conversation and failing.

Buddy blinked once, twice. Then he said, in a tone I couldn’t place—maybe a fisherman, maybe a child—“Bird hears. Bird keeps.”

I nodded. The bay did its midnight breathing. The café windows threw warm squares onto the planks like invitations I was too tired to accept. Buddy leaned against my shoulder, astonishingly light.

The next morning, I unlocked my phone and pressed play on the voicemail I had not touched for two years. My father sounded like himself in a way no one else ever would: exasperated, affectionate, in a hurry. “Storm’s moving fast. Don’t wait for me. Make the soup. Love you.” I wrote the words on an index card and taped it to the espresso machine where only I could see.

Buddy stayed through the winter, through the thaw, through the first gull with more opinions than feathers. Every so often, he tried on a new voice and returned a sentence to its owner, and sometimes that hurt; often it helped. He was no oracle. He didn’t conjure the dead. He only kept what he heard and offered it back when the room needed it most.

On the first truly warm day of spring, I took him down to the shore. The tide was low enough to peel secrets out of the rocks. I tossed him a grape; he declined in the mayor’s dignified baritone. “Citrus, please.”

I laughed and peeled an orange. He ate with gusto, smacking his beak in a way that was purely, blissfully his. When he finished, he looked at the horizon and, in his own voice at last—thin but steady—said, “Good day for a small boat.”

“Yes,” I told him. “But we’ll stay ashore.”

He hopped to my wrist and bowed his head to be scratched. Seabreeze moved through the reeds like the beginning of a song. Buddy whistled a few notes back, not an echo of anyone else, just himself finding the tune. And I thought how lucky we were, all of us: to keep, to be kept, and to speak in the voices we carry until they become our own.