The Parrots Read Online Free

had requested, with a raging snowstorm beating down on the city, and on his young shoulders.
    The snowflakes were whirling about him with such fury that he had felt as if he were being attacked by a swarm of frozen wasps. Floundering in the storm, he had headed straight for the massive building at the far end of the park. Beyond the curtain of snow a light could be glimpsed inside the building. Without knowing what the building was, he had pushed open the door and gone in.
    Wooden floors and warmth. Light and silence. A refuge for wayfarers sheltering from the cold? More than anything else, a museum. A deserted museum. Nobody to greet him at the ticket office, nobody in the cloakroom. Hesitant at first, The Master had taken this as a sign of charitable welcome, and pushed on inside, starting to walk through the warm, desolate rooms, still half numbed by the cold, until he had noticed a human presence at the far end of one of the rooms. He had taken off his steamed-up glasses and approached. The human figure had turned out to be a girl, standing motionless in front of a painting. The Master had come up behind her to get a better look at both the girl and the painting.
    The painting was
St Francis Preaching
to the Birds
by Oskar Laske. The girl was very beautiful. She was staring at the painting as if it were a window wide open on a dream, and she was crying: her cheeks were streaked with big tears.
    “…by a study carried out on a number of Asian and African men who had died of other causes, more than 30 per cent of fifty-year-olds given post mortems present signs of a carcinoma in the prostate…”
    The Master ignored this bothersome interference and reestablished radio contact with the spaceship of memories.
    Without a second thought, he had asked her in his laboured German, “Why are you crying?”
    “Because St Francis was good,” the girl had replied.
    “…in eighty-year-olds the figure reaches 70 per cent. In any case, from now on you’ll have to undergo regular PSA tests, but I feel moderately optimistic in your case.”
    When they left the museum, it was still snowing, although less hard. She had put her arm through his as if afraid of getting lost. They had taken shelter in a café near the Naschmarkt, where they had laughed, drunk hot tea and eaten Sachertorte.
    “…without a prostate you will encounter a number of small inconveniences…”
    Then they had ended up in a pension behind the opera house and made love all night, while outside it had snowed without respite.
    “Such as impotence…”
    Where did that memory come from? Did the prostate have a memory and was this one of its reminiscences? Why had he never thought of it again until today? Were they his memories or his organ’s memories? The Master wondered.
    “Are you listening to me?”
    The Master left the girl sleeping in the unmade bed in the pension, and nodded at The Urologist.
    “I was saying that without a prostate you will encounter a number of inconveniences, such as impotence. But at your age certain appetites are probably…”
    The Urologist said this as if he were a priest hearing the dying confession of a whoremonger. The Master looked at him sternly.
    “Impotence, and incontinence.”
    “Am I going to piss in my pants?”
    “You see, since the demolition phase of the prostatectomy, the bladder, the distal urethra and the periurethral and perineal muscles have remained intact. Except that we had to reconstruct your urinary tract, establishing communication between the bladder and the remaining urethral segment. This will cause you problems with urination.”
    The Master got off the spaceship. “Are you saying I’ll have to wear incontinence pads?”
    “You’ll have to undergo rehabilitative treatment to strengthen the muscle fibres and the perineal region.”
    “Doctor, I’m in the running for a very important prize. There’s a strong possibility I’ll win it. I can’t risk pissing myself onstage.”
    “It’s just a