The Attack

December 8, 2005

I don’t have to be at work until 9:30 a.m., and it takes me roughly 45 minutes to get there. I get up just before 8 and am newly amazed on a daily basis that it is still dark outside. I was running particularly late to work on this particular day, and as I walked to the subway from my apartment, I remember thinking how grey everything was, how routine things, and this walk, have already become, how…BAM!! Right in midst of my mundane melancholy, something of unidentifiable texture hit me on the back of the head. The blow was not painful and yet hard enough to jolt me forward. As is always the case in such situations, one second seems like an eternity—an eternity in which I pondered all of the terrible things that were about to happen to me. I was 100 percent sure that my life was over, and that seeing that the first blow didn’t knock me unconscious, the perpetrator would knock me another one, shove me into a trunk and that would be the last anyone saw of Liza Shurik.

As soon as I came to, which must have been only a couple of milliseconds later, I saw a huge crow flying directly above my forehead. In mid-flight, the blasted crow landed on my head and took off again. I felt like I was going insane: how often could this possibly happen? Then it struck me: maybe it didn’t happen at all. I quickly looked around to see if anyone else had laid witness to my attack. I was hoping to find a startled face, I would even settle for an amused, mocking face, someone, anyone who would share in my bewilderment and confirm my sanity. But, alas, all I found was a man sitting in his car looking at his cell phone and a woman walking fast, with her head tilted down under the hefty hood of her coat. What a way to wake up! Suddenly, I felt a little more alive than I had before my momentary rendezvous with Sir Crow. His unexpected entrance and quick departure from my life made me feel as though, somehow, Mother Nature knew that I needed a hit to the head. I felt an indescribable pang of joy rush through my entire body, leaving me refreshed and covered in goose-bumps.

As I walked, chin up, to the metro, I pitied all the people who didn’t see what had happened to me: it would have made for a great morning story in the office. Naturally, when I got to work, I told my colleagues all about it. They were all amused and within a few hours the story had spread to other departments. At lunch, sitting with the regular crowd, we discussed how it came to pass that a crow would use my head as perch and then a take-off port. Little did we know that we had crow specialists among us: Vlad had seen a very informative television program, while Nazee had read about them in some magazine.

“You know, crows are the smartest animals on the planet,” said Vlad.

“No,” I said, “Smarter than dogs and monkeys? Maybe they’re just the smartest bird,” I suggested.

We discussed it and in the end couldn’t decide whether they were the smartest animal or the smartest bird, and not having enough information to come to any conclusion, we decided to abandon the issue altogether.

“Crows can count, you know,” said Vlad.

Again I was baffled. “What!? How can that be, they can’t even talk!” I was almost enraged at the lunacy of such a suggestion.

But he and Nazee both assured us that not only could they count, they could even add. Of course, none of us could come up with a way by which a crow would express his/her answer, so we moved away from this topic as well. After all some of life’s greatest mysteries cannot be explained. Then Nazee suggested that maybe it thought I had a hat on and wanted to steal it for its nest. Of course: why didn’t I think of that?

But then I remembered a story that Tamara’s sister-in-law Sopha had told me:

There was a crow’s nest outside the front door of her apartment building some years ago. One day, a woman from the complex destroyed the nest. Sopha claims that she and this woman look very similar, but I think she just doesn’t want to admit that it was she who destroyed the nest. It is important to note that Sopha is a rather large woman, which sets her apart from most people here. Apparently, the crow had witnessed the destruction of its nest by an equally large woman, and in the mist of its hysteria it took its aggression out on Sopha: it started stalking her. Since that day, and for a few weeks after that, the crow would stand watch over the front door of her building and when Sopha came out, it would swoop down, nearly hitting her in the head. He followed her all the way to the metro, every day. After a few days she started feeling uncomfortable. She would peek out the door and see if he was around, walk quicker to the metro, and take on other precautionary measures.

This made me reanalyze my own situation, and I was slightly saddened. I had attributed my morning episode to a divine intervention aimed at de-normalize my daily drone, but in reality, it was nothing more than an act of hostility and hatred. Maybe the crow was mad at someone who looked like me and I was going to fall victim to his rage. The only thing that didn’t add up is how the crow could tell me apart from anyone else. I am just an average sized girl in the same black coat that one out of every two girls is wearing. When I got home that night, I told Tamara about the morning’s events. She thought about it for a moment and then, with full seriousness said: “Maybe it was your scarf.” I wear a bright stripped scarf that I bought in Target back at home and it is, without a doubt, the brightest scarf I have seen here—maybe a girl with a similar scarf had offended the crow. ‘Maybe,’ I thought to myself, ‘since crows are so smart I should have tried to communicate with him: clear up the misunderstanding, let bygones be bygones.’ But then I don’t know that I could tell my crow apart from the others and any attempt at reconciliation might be wasted and could potentially generate conflicts with crows that otherwise harbored no hostility towards me.

The next day, I forgot about the whole thing, and just as I was walking out the door, Tamara reminded me to look around and be aware of the crows flying overhead. I quickly changed my scarf, and walked to the metro with my hood on.