MUNIE bred and sold birds. His moldy little house covered with
moss and sprouting with slippery little mushrooms, had gradually
acquired the appearance of a chickencoop. The pigeons had sprinkled
the walls, shelves, and tables with a thin coat of chalk. There was a
smell of mildew and bird droppings, and the small dirty windowpanes
admitted a sparse, cold, leaden light. From cages of every description
came a continual shrill chirping; there was a hopping behind the wires
and a tapping of beaks against various tin lids and other objects. Munie
lounged on his heavy leather seat, crawled into the pigeons' cages,
felt them with his hands, blew into their feathers, and quietly paired
the various birds. Gentle tiny canaries, yellow as lemons, sang in little
cage. Pigeons covered with feathers and strong as hens walked about
the house. And in the half-darkness there always sat squat peasants
with thick, potato-like noses, birdcatchers come from somewhere in the
wet Byelorussian forests; they gabbled, jostled about, took naps on
bags of potatoes in the corners, and sucked big old-fashioned pipes,
blowing smoke like steam engines.

Deals were concluded in silence: plump red-breasted robins were
bartered for broken cages, and finches of the color of dark camomile
for mousetraps or threadbare old hats that had lain in the attic for
years. Staring stupid eyes looked slowly from under thick eyebrows,
like ponds overgrown with bushes, and occasionally a word was said,
lazily and hoarsely, that sounded more like a cough or a groan.

Munie shuffled all over the place, occasionally slapping an ancient
hand, and this meant that a silent peasant would set out for a birch
wood the next day at dawn, and linger there for weeks on end, until
he had finally lured a squirrel, or even a pure-feathered canary, into
a cage. Surely songs about Munie were sung in the swamps and in all
the remote woods of Byelorussia!

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