You see them everywhere if you know where to look. The peanut people. Innocent. Innocuous. Old. Find yourself a park bench in winter or spring, sit down, and close your eyes. Listen. There’s a European Robin with its short, crisp tick. The boo-beep, boo-beep, boo-beep of the Great Tit. And there, somewhere nearby, the rustle of plastic and the soft patter-plap of something falling on the floor. Keep your eyes closed! Soon you’ll hear a few wing-flaps and a soft caw. Hear a few hops along the ground. Confident. Brazen. Is that swagger? (You’ve good ears.) Then the clack of a beak on a nut and a flutter of wings.
Open your eyes.
What you missed was a local Carrion Crow, Raven, or Rook nabbing monkey nuts chucked by a peanut person. You really should have kept your eyes open.
There are many of these benevolent guardians around Leipzig, passing out much-needed protein to the black cloaks. But is it as benign as all that?
The other day, The Mathematician and I were out strolling in the green, being careful not to tread on star-of-bethlehem and violets. We see a young man with a giant bag of nuts and several corvids at his feet. They look at him, waiting. He throws a couple. There’s a tussle. The quickest and closest crows fly off a metre with their prize and begin pecking at the shells. The others don’t mob them. They wait. They know more nuts are coming.
As we near the group, a few black eyes turn our way but we’re not a threat. They stay put. The nuts rain down.
“D’you think he’s lonely?” I ask.
“Maybe. You think the crows are his friends?”
“I think he thinks they are.”
We pass him and walk towards a man doing HIIT training between two topographical oddities. (Is that half-buried masonry?) He sports a gaudy headband and a moustache made for someone twice his age.
A little farther on, I see a flash of yellow. Two cyclists have crossed a nearby car park and are heading towards us. High-vis helmets, high-vis jackets — everything about them seems to glow.
“A little overdressed for the park, aren’t they?” I say to The Mathematician, pointing.
“They’re police.”
I stop pointing.
They cycle past us, barely making eye contact — their focus is on skirting the large puddles in their path.
Are the bike ones armed, I wonder.
I turn to see where they’re heading.
“Are they lost?”
“I doubt it,” says The Mathematician. “Oh, a new plant!”
Whilst she stoops to identify it, I watch the cops.
“They’ve stopped by the peanut guy. What do they want with him?”
“Sticky mouse ear.”
“What?”
“It’s a sticky mouse ear.”
She takes a step sideways to identify something else.
“It’s not illegal to feed crows, is it?” I say.
“I don’t think so.”
I casually observe. One cop is talking, the other is hanging back, like he’s keeping watch or something.
“Someone must have called them though, right? I mean, it’s pretty out of the way here. Are they park police?”
“I don’t know …”
I recognise the ellipsis. It means: “This conversation, being less interesting than my latest discovery, has been placed in a buffer for later review/deletion.”
“What’s that one?” I ask
“Shepherd’s purse. The app’s a bit slow today.”
I’ve taken my eyes off the action. When I look back, the police are gone. Peanut man is walking forlornly off the path. His crows have all flown off.
“What was that about,” I ask myself, and have a brief discussion. I (we?) come up with a plausible theory. The cops and the crows are at war. It makes perfect sense. The cawing that you hear from the rooftops? Lookouts. There’s regular trouble down south in Connewitz, a very left-wing part of the city. (Think militant left: bin and car burnings, regular assaults on the police station, demos, thrown bricks …) And how do they choose to dress? In black! The colour of their co-conspirators.
Or masters?
I think I’m onto something. The crows are the gang lords, the heads of the anti-establishment coalition. And the peanut people? Their servants, or messengers, or ambassadors. Are they the ones who spray all the ACAB tags around the city?
I’m confident I’ve cracked it.
“What are you smiling about?” asks The Mathematician, standing up.
“I love crows,” I say.
She squeezes my hand.
“I know.”
