Uninvited Associations – Creatures of the Earth

This morning she was lying in front of the elevator door. I almost overlooked her on my way from the mailbox to the glass elevator, because I was already reading the headlines as usual. Obviously, I had startled her and she had flown into the glass wall. She must have broken her neck or other bones in her feathered body, which was now twitching strangely. As I approached, I saw her staring eyes and she was gasping for air, at least that’s how I interpreted her wide-open beak. As if she wanted to swallow the air, the head twitched and with it the whole body trembled.As if spellbound, I stared at the young bird in its death throes with a diffuse mixture of pity and compassion, the urge to help and the need to save this little life. In the face of suffering creatures, one becomes a (fellow) sufferer oneself.

Gratefully, I thought of a saving way out by making myself useful by going to the basement. With a shovel, one could at least bring them to a safe place. When I returned, the pigeon was lying there quietly. A downright peaceful picture of the lifeless body in its gray-blue-white pattern, reflecting the morning sun.

At that moment I had to think of Alan (or Ailan or Aylan) Kurdi. His image had become a symbol of the so-called refugee crisis. Early one morning, the young body was lying on the beach, lifeless and peaceful. The three-year-old boy had capsized and drowned while trying to reach the rescuing European mainland from Turkey in an inflatable boat – along with his mother Rehanna, older brother Galib and about a dozen other fugitives. The sea had washed the body ashore near the Turkish resort of Bodrum. Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir had captured the scene on Sept. 2, 2015, “to make the boys’ silenced cry audible to all,” she later said. The photo of the little boy in the red T-shirt and dark blue shorts went around the world.In the meantime, a lot has happened, an agreement between Turkey and Europe has changed many things on this coast and the civilian sea rescue organization Sea Eye has named a rescue boat after the boy. But nothing has changed, because people like the Kurdi family are still fleeing the civil war via Damascus, Aleppo and Kobane and see the way across the sea as the only way out.

We have become accustomed to the images and usually we don’t see the death throes, I think to myself as I take the pigeon to the trash can.