Jens Bjørneboe, “Hanekampen.&;148; Originally published in Aftenposten, 1954. In Lanterner (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1977). Samlede Essays: Epistler (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1996), 117-122. ©1977, 1996 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. English translation ©1999 by Esther Greenleaf Mrer.
To a very special degree it is given to poultry to be our likenesses. The hen the woman's. The rooster the man's.
The hen's task is of a gentler, more mildly ironic nature. The rooster's mission is murderous, annihilating. Nature used the knife when it created the chanticleer and the cockerel.
For what is the biddy's garrulous, faintly imbecile good-heartedness compared with the cock's raw and stupid self-importance? Regarded as a caricature the cock is much nastier, much more pointed. Nature's ridicule of the quintessential feminine, the cackling, tripping, rounded, which must really be seen from behind to be enjoyed—this holding up to ridicule still lies within the frame of the comic. But that same nature's mockery of the masculine principle is no longer a laughing matter. It is sinister—because it describes the void. The strutting, brutal, tyrannical, self-centered void.
I once saw a humiliated rooster. And I will never forget it: The tyrant in his underwear, with a yellow look and sick with self-pity, the life-lie incarnate, the deposed, wounded authoritarian. The blustering, postprandially snoozing, terrible, active vacuum, this absolute nothing under his feathers.
At least the hen lays eggs.
I never saw him eat anything but chicks or small pieces of the neighbor children's legs. He probably had to have this because of his chronic oversupply of adrenalin. He was the angriest beast I've ever seen. With outspread wings and open beak he attacked everything that moved. He snarled with meat-hunger.
And joyfully the hens put their heads together: Had anyone seen the like of that rooster! They quavered and clucked and tripped with emotion, they danced with rapture over the wife-beater while he hacked out their feathers and slurped up the contents of the eggs.
I openly confess that I was very much afraid of the cannibal.
And in the spring, when the rooster was outside and we ourselves sometimes went down the stairs, this fear was especially troublesome. We never had visits, not even wolves would have ventured onto the lawn.
Still, the farmyard had to be invaded while this tiger in bird's clothing lay in wait. And among those who had to invade it was Atlanta. Atlanta from Northern Norway, who had previously helped us with washing and cleaning. This Atlanta was illiterate, not because of deficient schooling, but for far more deep-seated reasons. And yet she carried on a not insignificant correspondence, both with the authorities and with her northern homeland. Especially with the authorities. She generally paced the floor as she dictated to me, and together we must have resembled one of the old engravings of Goethe and his secretary, writing down the last scenes of Faust. She had got into this habit “for her eyesight's sake”, as she was wont to put it, and since we had no reason to hurt her feelings, we let the formulation stand. However, things weren't so well with her, and after the dictation, which was a great strain on her, she would rest at our place. This former domestic help soon developed into a kind of prematurely aged child in the house.
Now, all would have been well if the blood-cock had never lived.
But live he did.
And since the neighbor children's calves became steadily scarcer fare, he went after Atlanta. Several times she had saved herself by dashing across the farmyard, but finally he got hold of her.
We were sitting on the glassed-in veranda, reading.
And from outside a sound reached us. That is: “sound” isn't really the word.
No elephant in a burning jungle could have given a more convincing expression of fright and pain than Atlanta did on this occasion. The potted plants withered around us. The porch windows danced, and I poured warm tea on Strindberg.
Caligula had caught Atlanta on the very steps of the veranda. She lay down and clawed at the door. It was unlocked. Instinctively and quick as lightning I turned the key, and only behind the locked glass door did the situation become clear to me.
My wife looked at me.
Then she looked at the key.
After that she looked at me again.
It was a very eloquent look.
And slowly I turned the key back again. We pulled Atlanta in, and Caligula loosed the hold he had got on her hamstring.
“We'll get you some new stockings, Atlanta,” said my wife.
“I shall punish the rooster,” I added.
Then I heard my own laughter, wild and shrill.
For up out of the blood's secret memories there had mounted a piece of forgotten wisdom. Water, I thought, and I knew this at once: It is with water that such monsters are to be combatted. With water in a bucket.
And armed with the kitchen pail filled to the brim, I descended the steps of the veranda.
Far off I saw Caligula among the hens. At the same time he saw me. He spread his
wings and went to the attack, without wasting a second. He shot his breast forward and
laid his head back, ready to peck. He advanced three quarters of the way, yellow and
vicious. Then he stopped.
The pail of water had hindered me from fleeing, and the chanticleer had thus met an enemy who didn't run away. The first victory was won. I went forward. I looked him in the eye. He stopped. He stood his ground.
I lifted the bucket, took one more step, and the wave of water hit him like a big snowball. It struck him across the back and knocked him down. Seldom have I seen such a flight.
I fetched more ammunition, and caught up with the enemy behind a juniper bush. He only got a little wetter this time. After that it was harder to hit him. Five or six buckets watered the farmyard in succession, in the immediate neighborhood of a deathly-scared, cackling rooster. Then I got in a direct hit, this time from the front. He howled. He yammered, he fled. Wet feathers lay behind him on the ground. I kept getting more water, for I knew that a low nature will always interpret lenience as fear. Any chivalry from my side would have been construed by Caligula as weakness. I continued. And slowly a change took place in him. Twice more I hit the bull's-eye, but of at least as great significance for the vanquished was the fact of being driven around the yard in front of the hens.
It was his fact, that they were witnesses to his defeat, which demolished him for good. He dragged his wet tail feathers around on the turf. Like a bridal train he dragged them after him. He wept. He was wet to the skin, in the deepest sense washed up, humiliated, stripped bare.
His comb hung down over his eyes.
And finally it happened: He ran into the flock of hens and hid. The hens concealed him with their bodies, only his back was exposed.
The last bucketful I dripped on him. And every drop hit home.
He sank under the hens' wings, and there he lay.
In the course of an hour and a half something had broken inside him, something which could never be built up again. His inner world was in ruins. He was no longer a cock. He never crowed again. From that day he ate only grain. He had become poultry.
This is the saga of a rooster. But for me it stands at the same time as a not unimportant contribution to the psychology of tyranny: the less one has under one's feathers, the louder one crows.
And the intelligent reader will have noted that the hens, the nice, subservient, feeble-minded hens, had more resources in the hour of danger than the cock had.
Thus does life dissolve into paradoxes.
