Who Is Martha? (10 page)

“Blind an eye when I pull you out of the water?”

“Just look away,” Levadski laughed. The butler understood. He too would be old one day, nobody could dodge fate.

Several times Levadski invited the butler to take a seat while he lay in the bath, but he literally stood his ground. One may not sit in front of guests. Levadski tried arguing that he could not comfortably splash around in the water knowing that someone was standing behind him. Habib agreed to sit on the pouf and wait. “Why not in the armchair or on the beautiful six-legged sofa?” The butler assured him that he did not need a backrest in order to sit comfortably.

In the bathtub Levadski contemplated sitting comfortably. You needed a backrest. No question. You get a backache without a backrest. But who knows, perhaps keeping up appearances is the only sensible kind of comfort. We decide to feel comfortable, a lot more comfortable than we would in a misshapen orthopedically optimized piece of furniture.

“Do you like Beethoven?” the butler’s voice penetrated his sleep. Levadski gave a start and put a wet hand to his chest. Every time he thought his dentures had gone astray he had to touch his chest.

“Yes,” he called back hoarsely. Why was he asking? Breathing heavily, Levadski recovered from his fright, and already the sound of the first bars of Symphony No. 9 in D-Minor, Op. 125 filled the room. Written in the years when Beethoven was already completely deaf. Lonely and estranged from everyone, thought Levadski, feeling an icicle pierce the muscle of his heart. His last symphony …
Freude schöner Götterfunken
, Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, la la la lalalala!

Somewhere, Levadski had read, there were hundreds of Beethoven’s conversation books. The deaf man got by in everyday life, armed with a pencil and a notebook. Better than nothing. That the need to communicate with people never seems to have diminished for Beethoven! People are people, thought Levadski, paddling in the water, music really must be inside us, but not being able to hear any birds – that must be difficult. Levadski closed his eyes and stopped paddling. The forest of violins advanced into the bathroom, beseeching flutes circled around the crystal chandelier for several chords, and then fate violently began to trample. And again the rustling of the violins like leaves in the whistling wind of the flutes. If a resident orchestra is part of the butler service, then I really am lost for words, thought Levadski.

“Where is the music coming from?” he called out during a quiet moment, in the direction of the door.

“From the CD player!” the butler answered. His voice sounded soft, almost like Red Riding Hood in a forest of violins.

After the uplifting
Molto vivace
Levadski asked the butler to pull him out of the water. The young man didn’t seem to be doing it for the first time. “Are there many guests in the hotel who require assistance when they are bathing?” Levadski wanted to know.

“They sometimes do. The butlers are here to cater to people’s special needs, and besides I have a father,” said Habib. “Had,” he added. “In broad daylight a strangeness suddenly overcame him and he collapsed in the middle of the room. He lay on the carpet gasping: a stroke. I looked after him until he died. Then I came here and became a hotel bellboy and later a butler.”

Levadski would have liked to say something fortifying. Breathing laboriously, wrapped in a dressing gown, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the shiny badge on Habib’s chest. “Your name is Habib,” Levadski said with the slight hint of a question. Habib demonstrated his affirmation by doubling his chin.

Screeching, a streetcar turned into the Kärnter Ring Boulevard. “I am tired,” said Levadski, “I would like to sleep now.” Habib removed himself. His steps were as contained as those of the chambermaid. Both belonged entirely to the rolling fire-red carpet, to the white doors and gold-plated door handles. Both allowed this confident proud knowledge to flow into their limbs and into the strength of their movements. Habib turned again at the threshold and carefully pulled the door closed behind him, as if he imagined that Levadski had already fallen asleep while he’d been sitting there. I will never forget it, thought Levadski, never.

IX

L
EVADSKI DID NOT HAVE MUCH TIME LEFT TO FORGET
. According to the diagnosis he should have felt dreadful. Considerable loss of weight, night sweats, fever, faintness – but apart from palpitations that gripped Levadski as if he was a youngster when he moved from window to window in his Elisabeth Suite or admired the array of ornaments in the room, all these symptoms were kept waiting. From the breast pocket of his pajamas, however, his heart announced an overwhelming joy at beautiful things, pleasure and desire, to see beauty like the light of God’s face. Beauty in spite of the revolting decay of the institution of his body, beauty in spite of ugliness and precisely because of it. Beauty.

Levadski stepped to the window. On the opposite side of the street the comforting
Phoenix Pharmacy
sign glowed above the archways of a building. And beneath it, in small unassuming lettering:
since 1870
. Two streetcars drove past each other. Levadski looked at the streetcars that blocked his view of the pharmacy. The driver who sported an imposing potbelly appeared to be dozing in the darkness of his cabin.
Catch the Beat
.
House of Music
was written on the white roof of the streetcar.

The other streetcar stopped immediately in front of Levadski’s window. It was of modern construction, black-red-gray-dark gray, the interior glaring brightly. An old lady with a gigantic white poodle on her lap was sitting at the front, in the area for pregnant women and the disabled. The poodle, glassy eyed, stared out the window at an even whiter dog floating behind it in the form of a little cloud of smoke – a ghost, a drowned twin brother, a hushed up doggie mishap. Slowly the streetcar swam by.

Levadski winced. They weren’t singed banknotes, after all, but wilted leaves which swept across the street. A white paper cup was being kicked by the wind’s invisible foot. Peace, an unbelievable peace, like after a clap of thunder, suffused Levadski’s slight body. Bitter and terrifying. Dizzying. A transparent onion skin in the diluted soup of Levadski’s life.

I should really be feeling awful, thought Levadski, it’s called a small cell bronchial carcinoma, the animal I have been bitten by. It put its whole lousy soul into the bite. In principle, an admirable and selfless deed. Levadski dropped onto his canopied bed, fell asleep and dreamed he was in a baroque church at an organ recital. The music makes him cry. He sobs like a child. Through the tears, Levadski sees how the music creates movement, how it rolls the glittering molecules of air towards the altar, like billiard balls. The golden angels whirring around the altar fall to the ground. Saint Peter, the cross in his sinewy hand, leaning over the abyss, falls in. Clouds of silver and gold come crashing down after hundreds of years. Levadski, listening to the organ, drenched in tears, is covered by a cloud of dust.

A coughing fit woke Levadski in the middle of the night. He reached for his wallet on the night table and extracted a piece of paper, the bill from the laboratory, which had arrived shortly before his departure flight. He had absolutely no intention of paying it. Beneath the stated balance, an impudent laboratory technician had permitted himself to comment on Levadski’s condition: inoperable, chemotherapy and radiotherapy recommended for prolongation of life (a few months). Medication: polychemotherapy.

“Pure nonsense,” Levadski scolded. He put the note back on the night table. “The stuff doesn’t seem as anodyne as nonpareils.” He tossed and turned in bed until dawn, anticipating the symptoms of the illness. The more he concentrated on the wet embrace of his nightshirt, the more he perspired. It’s happening, thought Levadski, now I’m getting the night sweats.

A chambermaid must have rung and entered on silent paws while Levadski was shoving his ball-retained dentures into his mouth in front of the bathroom mirror, like a bread roll that was far too big. Levadski was startled and apologized for still being in his bathrobe, but he was sweating so profusely. The chambermaid reckoned this was due to the air-conditioning that was heating his room to an incredible seventy-seven degrees. She adjusted a dial on the wall. It would get cooler soon, she promised, and besides, the air-conditioning switched itself off automatically if you opened one of the windows. So, no symptoms after all, Levadski registered with disappointment.

“Where are you from?” The wiry chambermaid, who was already on her way to the door, turned around, beaming. Her hands, much too ungainly for her arms, appeared to flutter. She must be a laundry woman, thought Levadski, with hands like that. Or a gray heron. She was from the south of Serbia. Near Novi Pazar. Alarming, thought Levadski, how embarrassingly touching someone else’s pleasure can be, how easy it is to awaken it! Even with a mundane question which you ask only so as not to be silent. Alarming.

“Novi Pazar is beautiful. Village too. Here my home.” The short-haired woman pulled a light pink cell phone from her apron and after pressing several times on the buttons, pointed at a photo, in which Levadski could see nothing but a neglected building site in the middle of a gentle hill surrounded by woodland.

“My heart is my house. Green,” the chambermaid smiled in the direction of Levadski’s suspicious eyebrow. “I finish build, when back. Here finish work, there finish build. Here,” with one finger, the chambermaid traced a circle in the emptiness that lay beyond the periphery of the picture, “sister’s house. We nine children. Two sisters dead. Here!” The chambermaid let Levadski look at a picture of two gravestones and then cheerfully clicked on. In an overexposed photograph a boy was hugging a girl on a children’s bicycle. “Children of my brother. And here me.” In the midst of sprawling bushes Levadski recognized the chambermaid. She was wearing a shirt covered with oversized raspberries. “Raspberries back there. Jam, juice, own products, in Novi Pazar we have everything. Here letter for you. From reception. Almost forgot. I go now.”

Levadski took the letter. The simple solemnnity of the moment drove a tear into his eye, but the remarkably firm handshake of the chambermaid with the raspberry garden and the unbuilt house instantly cheered him up again.

Dear Mister Levadski,

As you made use of our butler service yesterday, we would like to advise you that you are most welcome at any time to avail yourself of the services of our butlers throughout your sojourn at our hotel. If you are interested in a personal butler, please call reception.

Levadski was chewing a banana when the telephone rang. “Come in,” Levadski called in the direction of the door. He was annoyed that a piece of banana fell out of his mouth and onto the carpet when he did so. The telephone rang several times more before Levadski’s gaze gave up on the door. Rocking and wheezing, he got to his feet, trotted over to the desk and picked up the receiver.

The concierge wished Levadski a very good morning. Levadski wished the concierge the same. He had just read the letter and would be interested in the butler from yesterday. The concierge acknowledged this wise decision with a pregnant pause. The butler service would be deducted from Levadski’s credit card at the end of his stay, together with the extras, the concierge said. “What extras?” Levadski wanted to know.

“Telephone, internet, minibar, breakfast, hotel bar, restaurant, barbers,” the concierge-voice rattled off.

And funeral, thought Levadski, giggling into the receiver.

“Do you see the butler button on your telephone? Above it there is a button with a picture of a man in a black bow tie with a coffee cup,” the concierge said. Levadski saw it. All he had to do was press the button once and the butler would come.

“When I press the button, I would like Habib to come.”

“But of course, sir. Habib will be informed immediately.”

This is what things have come to, thought Levadski, an oriental youngster serving an old Ruthenian. From a Ruthenian to a Bohemian, he rhymed.

Levadski dressed himself for breakfast. Buying a new suit, along with the resolve to await death pleasurably in a grand hotel, had been one of the best ideas of his too-long life. Although, thought Levadski, it all seems to have been a little on the short side. This snippet of time I have grappled with. A tiny puddle! Levadski tied his favorite bow tie with the red-billed choughs and marveled at the strange expression. Why was he thinking about a tiny puddle? In the gigantic mirror, an elegant gnome held its silence.

On the sea I was born

On the sea I was raised;

Swore unto the sea did I

To take her as my eternal bride:

To drown therefore my lot would be

As a sailor on the sea,

sang Levadski, to himself. It was as if his life had been a dream of a future and resolute being, of an ultimately irrational being and a sophisticate, of someone whose existence had been worthwhile. And now he was perfect and his life would step outside of him and stand before him, to marvel at him: you have become useless, Levadski. Pah!

Smartly dressed and feeling slightly hungry, Levadski stepped out into the corridor. The elevator came almost immediately, opening its golden chest. From all sides Levadski could see a small bald dandy staring back at him. This hotel is a ship, thought Levadski stepping into the elevator, a ship, and I am a black-headed gull on deck.

E

AUSGANG / EXIT
HALLE / LOBBY
RESTAURANT / CAFÉ / BAR

A
BLACK-HEADED GULL ON DECK.
L
ARUS RIDIBUNDUS.
Larus, Larus … the name sounds like an invocation. I chose the suit well, true to myself … Here I stand, my breath and I, I and my pathetic little soul. How flat the buttons with the floor numbers are! G for ground, M for Maisonette Suite and my suite, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. A black-headed gull on deck. Poppycock, it can’t be on deck. The black-headed gull can do nothing but follow a ship. It follows the giants of the ocean that slowly set out from harbor. It catches everything the sailors throw to it: flowers, potatoes, nails. It does! With the chocolate-colored hood it displays during the breeding season it can easily be distinguished from other types of gulls, assuming you know which one it is. I know which one it is. But I would, however, like to seriously question my own corporality at this moment in time. So comforting are the lights here in the golden cabin, so dull any memory of pain, so dim. I can prolong or curtail the flight at any time and enter another dimension. Go to the fifth and last floor for example. But now it is time to hover.