In the midst of arguing with the President, we hadn’t noticed that some of the fog had lifted, making for improved visibility. To boot, we’d made ourselves even more of a target by coming together in a single, shouting mass.

  The argument abruptly came to a halt, cut short by everyone’s immediate need for protection. The first thing we had to do now was to get out of harm’s way. Arguing about whose fault it was would have to come later.

  “Any bright ideas, anyone?” the President asked.

  A state of temporary cease-fire now in effect, the Writer, who had taken on the role of being our collective spokesman, said, “There isn’t much we can do. Let’s go back home once night falls, making sure we don’t attract too much attention, and wait for them to cool down. They can’t keep up their attack on us forever.”

  The President evidently thought differently: he argued that it was necessary to respond to violence with even greater violence and was of the opinion that “there is to be no giving in to terror.” Violence was to be used to intimidate, frustrate, and destroy the enemy. This was the only option, or else things would only get worse. It was out of the question for this attack to go unpunished. No matter how vehemently we pleaded and argued with him, it was totally in vain. He remained hell-bent on bloodthirst.

  He looked us over with an air of authority and told us it was absolutely imperative to show decisiveness in these kinds of cases. We could not fall weak before the enemy. If we wanted to be secure within our homes, we had to be willing to take on the risk posed by this war.

  “Have you forgotten, gentlemen, that I was the commander in chief of this country for years?” he then asked. “It’s only natural that I would know how to deal with these types of matters better than you, so it’s best you leave it to me.”

  To which Lara said, “It’s for that very reason that things have reached this point—you were the commander in chief!” But the President, barely acknowledging her, began to speak of his war plans.

  The frontline combat unit—which was to say, his men—would build a shelter overlooking the cove during the night. Though it would be a simple structure, it would be sufficient to keep the firing squads from getting hit. Taking up inside the shelter at night, the firing squads would open fire at dawn and wipe out the seagulls. The ammunition necessary for the job would be transported to the shelter at night.

  We tried to tell from the expression on his face if he was actually serious, but then sadly realized he couldn’t have been more serious. His lips were pursed; his fierce eyes, set with determination.

  I wondered for the umpteenth time: Why is this man so evil? For many years I’ve had a habit of comparing people to animals. I think each one of us looks like some particular animal. Some of us have a face like that of a bird, and some like that of a sheep. Some of us look like a horse, with a long face just as a horse has, while others have the face of a wolf. It’s my belief that we take on the personalities of the animals we resemble. I don’t know, maybe it’s just that it feels right to act like that animal. It’s what comes naturally. So can you imagine asking a sheep, say, why it acts so tame? Or asking a wolf why its behavior is so predatory?

  It was then that I realized what animal the President looked like. His thin, pursed lips were like a slit at the bottom of his face, their corners drawn downward. With his protruding cheekbones and the blank stare in his eyes, it was a shark he resembled—and to a tee. I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed this before, and thought, “So. This is his nature, then—the nature of a shark.” Asking him why he was so cruel would have been as absurd as asking a shark why its teeth were so sharp. This was how he perceived the world. I wanted to share this thought with Lara and the Writer as soon as possible, adding my two cents to our previous discussion. But now was neither the time nor the place to do so.

  As night fell, we left the shark to his war games and went home.

  The seagull lay stiff in the living room. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. What did one do with a dead seagull? Bury it? Toss it in the trash? I took it in my hand. “Ugh! What on earth are you doing!” Lara asked. “I’m examining the dead seagull,” I said.

  Inspecting it up close, I saw that its beak was broken, a piece of it barely hanging from a stringy tendon. It looked so pitiful, I thought, with its broken neck, its broken beak. What it had died for had hardly been worth it. There was no more than a broken window to show for its self-inflicted death. And though glass was hard to come by on the island, it could be shipped in, and the window restored.

  What they had actually achieved, paying for it with a grisly death, was to frighten everyone, instilling terror in people’s hearts. And the truth was that for this alone, suicide simply wasn’t worth it. Fear, too, after all, was a temporary emotion. It was possible for a person to be afraid one day and forget all about it the next, getting lost in the details of daily life and going on to laugh again.

  As I stared at the seagull in my hand, something occurred to me: that the suicide-bomber seagulls had been designated from among those who had lost their young. They might have even volunteered themselves. It would have been one way to escape the hideous pain of having lost their children.

  At any rate, a dead seagull wasn’t exactly a pleasant sight to behold. Or at least that’s the way I saw it, now that I perceived the seagulls with new eyes. Seagulls don’t strike one as particularly warm creatures when they’re alive, either, in any case. They have a cold and distant air about them; they don’t cozy up to people, and they don’t eat out of your hand. So that is why people have written folk songs in ode to nightingales, canaries, cranes, imaginary birds like phoenixes, and even crows and storks, and have never written even one ode to seagulls. Furthermore, there’s never been an ode sung to a single seagull in particular, because whatever songs were sung were in praise of the sight of flocks of them along the shore. Still, this dearth of musical inspiration provided on the part of seagulls could hardly have created a reason for killing them and destroying their babies. The fact is that despite their cold and heartless appearance, the way they sacrificed themselves was undeniably moving.

  The next day we stayed in again. There was no seagull attack this time, and calm apparently settled over the island, but we thought it best not to take any chances. It turned out to be a wise thing for us to have done, because that evening, disaster struck again.

  Lulled by the quiet of the moment, our guitarist friend at Number 4 had gone wandering in the hills, only to fall prey to an attack by the seagulls, during which he fell off the cliff. They found him with a broken leg, a broken arm, and a massive gash on his temple. He lay in bed with a fever for days. Worst of all was that it would be a long time before he could play the guitar again. This small tragedy brought a lot of sadness to the islanders. Now some of us had begun to think that the seagulls had gone too far.

  People were rarely going outside, only doing so if they absolutely had to, and even then, they would bring along a large pot or saucepan to hold over their heads, just in case. Our older and less agile friends weren’t taking any chances, walking around with pots on their heads for fear of falling victim to another sudden strike, even enduring the discomfort of walking around with their heads bent back, peeking out from beneath the pots as they walked.

  At night we would hear the clatter of the construction that was taking place. A day or two later, there was an announcement of the President/Shark’s war plans. Using tree branches and a few large pieces of wood stripped from closets and wooden doors, his men had erected a blockhouse in a secure location overlooking the seagulls’ cove. This giant closet was made in such a way that ten people could fit inside it, and place themselves in positions of safety via the long and narrow window that ran along its front wall.

  After the President’s men and a few of the islanders had finished building the blockhouse, once again they wasted no time in emptying out their guns on the seagulls. One morning a sharp ring of furious gunfire broke out on the island. Obviously enough, having begun the war at daybreak, they had surreptitiously taken cover in the blockhouse overnight. Once again the seagulls began to fall blood-soaked into the sea. We found out later on that this time there had been some islanders who had willingly shot at the birds, showing off their marksmanship as they did so. Like the others, this massacre also lasted till evening. As night fell, everyone went home.

  There was little left for us to do, now that things had reached this point and an all-out war had broken out. We would sit in despair at home, making every effort to convince our neighbors not to go on with the war against the seagulls, discovering that the islanders, too, had begun to hate the seagulls.

  The next day, surprisingly enough, nothing happened. We were anxiously awaiting another seagull attack toward morning, and were left standing by the window when it didn’t materialize. Nothing was happening. With its lush trees, its houses buried among multitudinous shades of green, and its verdant coves, the island may well have struck a newcomer as a paradise on earth, a harbor of peace and tranquility—as it used to be.

  The next day passed just as uneventfully, as did the day after that and the next few days that followed. Maybe the President/Shark’s methods had been successful, scaring off the seagulls. The theory that violence could only be prevented with greater violence had begun to draw more and more adherents. Little by little in the meantime, folks had started to go outside again, getting caught up in the sweet nuisances of the routines of daily life. From time to time, we’d shoot a glance across the distance at the seagulls’ cove and see them standing watch over their eggs, some of them diving into the sea in their hunt for food. The war must have come to an end.

  We took advantage of this period of stillness and made the necessary repairs to our home by ordering new windowpanes with a letter dispatched by the ferry. We began sipping wine among scents of cherry laurels, rose geraniums, and jasmine in the evenings again. And we made frequent visits to our guitarist friend, sharing cheerful anecdotes with him in our best attempts to chase away his blues. We didn’t see so much as a glimpse of the President and his men.

  And thus the days went on, all in a state of calm. But that was before the island got its first martyr.

  We had a quiet, withdrawn friend who lived by himself at Number 14. He wasn’t one to spend much time with the rest of us, setting off on his rowboat to go fishing early each morning and gathering the fishing nets he’d set out the night before. The friendship of the cigarettes that never left his lips was all the friendship he needed, it seemed. He was about fifty but looked even older, and was a man loved and respected by all. Exceptionally skilled in carpentry, he was always happy to lend us a hand with repairs we couldn’t manage on our own. Rumor had it that he’d once owned a carpentry studio, and that he’d settled on the island after losing his wife in a fire that had broken out in it.

  It was this friend of ours who was the victim of an attack by the seagulls shortly after taking off for the open sea on his boat early one morning. Though I didn’t witness it myself, according to those who looked on in terror from the shore, hundreds of seagulls descended in a throng on the defenseless man. They began to peck at him, shrieking with a frenzy as they ripped into him with their beaks. The blood gushing from the poor man’s head could be seen even from shore. A few people ran home for their guns so they could shoot the seagulls, but as he tried to stand up inside the boat, trying at the same time to protect his head between his hands, the poor man lost his balance and fell into the water. Yet the seagulls were relentless; when the man rushed up for air, they tore his flesh to pieces. A halo of blood began to form around the man’s head. He would grasp at the air with his hands, sinking and resurfacing, sinking and resurfacing, over and over again, so that even his hands were red.

  And that was how we lost our dear neighbor the carpenter. They brought his body back to shore an hour or two later, after pulling it out of the water before the currents had dragged it out to sea. We were struck with grief. It was only now, you might say, that we were beginning to realize just how savage the seagulls could be. We were filled with hatred by the things they had done—to an innocent person! Although it was unlikely we’d have felt such sorrow if their victim had been the President or his men, this had turned into a bloody tragedy in which the ones to lose their lives were not those who had set the war in motion.

  We buried the carpenter the following day at nightfall, next to our neighbors who had died of natural causes and who had expressed their wish not to be transferred to the mainland after their death. Some of our neighbors had been so traumatized by this onslaught that they came to the funeral holding stewpots over their heads and guns in their hands.

  The lurid fate of the eccentric carpenter left us all in tears. The neighbors were whispering, “Damn those seagulls! What could they have wanted with that poor man?” The President and his men didn’t say a word throughout the ceremony, silently watching events take their course. Grief-stricken, we said nothing, because we simply couldn’t think of what to say. We were well aware of both the depth of our mourning and the lethal hatred of the seagulls that had come over all of us. The circumstances being what they were, no one would have dared to say, “But we were the ones who attacked the seagulls in the first place, and now they’ve struck back. We’re the ones who are guilty here!” All logical arguments about any of this had lost all meaning. Everyone wanted revenge. Fear fed hatred, and hatred fed fear. I was stupefied, quite unable to talk. When I got home, I found Lara crying softly at the fate of the carpenter whom she’d loved so much. She said: “The President is the murderer!”

  “Best you don’t go saying that to anyone, whatever you do,” I said. “No one’s going to listen to such common sense when so much rage has gripped everyone. Hold your tongue. Please, for my sake.”

  I knew that the seagulls were now the islanders’ greatest enemy. Everyone was trying to come up with ways to get rid of them. Yet finding one was far from easy. The seagulls had not been intimidated, had not given up in the face of violence, and had taken revenge at every opportunity. At this rate, every new attack would only provoke them further and make life on the island all the more unbearable.

  Everyone felt a dreadful daily sense of desperation. Life had lost all its appeal for the islanders, who had acquired the habit of walking quickly while holding saucepans over their heads, gingerly lifting them up at their edges like helmets every now and then, tilting their heads back in fear as they looked out for the seagulls. They would gather at the shore, and, as the seagulls dove in and out of the sea, slicing the air like knives, the islanders would look on with hatred in their eyes. Plans of destroying them were discussed amid whispers at night. The plans ran the gamut, ranging from pouring gasoline on the seagulls’ cove and burning it to asking for help from the military units.

  As for me, quite frankly, I didn’t know what to think. The Writer and Lara refused to blame the seagulls, never once letting themselves forget how matters first began. Though I didn’t let on, I found myself unable to agree with them. After seeing the seagulls’ savagery, it was as though something had broken inside of me. True, they didn’t start the war, but this sure as hell was no way to live. If only none of this had ever happened!

  What can I say, my dear Writer friend: I’ve never been able to be either as resolute or as determined as you. I haven’t had the courage to be as independent in the way I think, nor to be on my own as much as you. As always, you were right, and so was Lara: sticking up for what was right was the best means of avoiding greater harm in the future, but now I can admit that the seagulls’ brutality had frightened me, too. The way they had put our guitarist friend in bed, and their utter savagery in pecking our poor carpenter friend to death, hadn’t left a single trace of sympathy for them within me. Maybe, in some romantic fashion, my tender, waffling heart preferred innocent victims to warriors out for revenge.

  The islanders’ hatred of the seagulls and their search for ways to do away with them had no doubt pleased the President enormously. It was exactly what he’d been after all along, having turned an enemy that had once been his alone into a common target of hatred.

  He explained his thoughts on the matter at a secret meeting, as we could no longer meet openly, not wanting to attract attention. He said it was necessary to attempt a brand-new tactic in the fight against the seagulls. The first rule of war was to pit your enemy against other enemy forces.

  After our neighbors finished applauding this apparent stroke of genius, the President/Shark explained his astounding war strategy: foxes were to be brought to the island. The foxes would decimate the seagull population by stealing the seagulls’ eggs and eating them. The fact that there were no foxes on the island had been why the seagulls’ numbers had grown “as large as a pack of bitches,” as he put it. This was the only hope the islanders had, according to him. Moreover, by using their advantage of intelligence and allowing the two species to attack each other, the islanders would be able to destroy the enemy without putting themselves in harm’s way.

  The President’s words were met with drawn-out applause and cries of “Bravo!” The islanders were breathing easy for the first time in a long time, now that they at least had something on which to pin their hopes where the future was concerned. The foxes that were on their way were viewed by everyone as saviors that would exact revenge for the poor carpenter’s death.

  Despite the Writer’s vociferous protests—about “the ecological balance” or something to that effect—no one was listening to him anymore. He had come to be labeled by the islanders as a dangerous troublemaker. A few people looked him over with contempt, with others expressing the opinion that his warnings were nothing more than those of an “intellectual blowhard.”