Who Is Martha? (21 page)

“You are a poet,” Mr. Witzturn tries to joke. The soul of a shy male dog barks out from inside him. “You may very well be right. After all, my piano teacher was a devotee of Scriabin. Do you know Scriabin? Scriabin’s desire was not only to be one with the music, but also for music to merge with all the senses. Do you know Scriabin?”

Levadski nods. A desire tickles his throat, the desire to bark, softly, very quietly and unobtrusively. Scriabin is dead, too.

“His idea of absolute music was unique. Scriabin worked on a composition that he programmatically called
Mysterium
. Here all the arts were to amalgamate into one gigantic
Gesamtkunstwerk
: music, voice, song, dance, color, scent … The performance of this composition was intended to take place in India and throw everything else into the shadow of what even the most opulent operas had ever been able to offer. Do you understand what it means to be a Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn asks, “to be a devotee of Scriabin? That’s what my piano teacher was.”

“An unfathomable secret,” Levadski murmurs, attempting to impale an ice cube in his glass with a stirrer.

“There are at least two things about Scriabin’s music that are entirely unusual,” Mr. Witzturn carries on. “He started out as a kind of Russian Chopin and ended up by taking giant steps, without running or tripping, at the boundaries of tonality.”

“At the boundaries of tonality,” Levadski repeats, stirring more rapidly in his glass.

“Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn continues, “never completely said goodbye to Romantic music and a tonal ideal, but broke through many metric, formal and harmonic conventions. This means something, doesn’t it? Conventions!” Mr. Witzturn fumbles with a hand that can’t decide: should it clench itself into a fist or not?

“My mother,” says Levadski, “my mother was my piano teacher, if I may be permitted to call her that. Women like song and dance.”

“They are music,” Mr. Witzturn grins into his glass. Levadski smiles embarrassedly through the ice cube he has jammed between two straws.

“It is only logical that children die after their parents. Everything you think is laughable or unnecessary as a child, you take seriously and consider important in the end – through the magic of death.”

“Magic?” Mr. Witzturn raises an eyebrow. “Very poetic …”

“Yes, magic, it throws a ruthless light on things that are intended to and desire to creep into the lives of those left behind,” says Levadski. His straws tremble and the ice cube sinks into the tides of the cocktail. “My mother was my piano teacher,” Levadski says, poking around in the hollow of an ice cube. “Her tinkling bothered me for as long as she lived. Her vacant face hovering over the piano and above all the clouds and her sweating, even that gave me a fright. Now I still can’t watch the musicians in their ecstasy without feeling horror.”

“Of course, you are confronted with the emptiness that the musicians see. The emptiness makes you scared,” Mr. Witzturn remarks.

“Exactly, or death that is full of promise. Will you be fulfilled or will you be unfulfilled? My mother seemed to simultaneously decompose, burn, to be reduced to molecules when she was playing music. How could it not be frightening? You know, she sent me on my way with something beautiful, something I took no notice of as a boy. A lesson! Something inside me preserved the moment and put it on a pedestal. This pedestal was to be the resting place of the lesson she secretly imparted to me. Would you like to know what the lesson was?” Woe if he says no, thinks Levadski. He could not offend me more deeply.

Mr. Witzturn nods.

“Does that mean yes or no?”

“I feel like I have been transported back to my youth when I am with you,” Mr. Witzturn smiles, “when I was so eager to understand women.”

“Yes or no?”

“I underestimated bad habits like Yes or no, Do you really love me, How do I look, and so forth in my youthful megalomania. I always wanted to grasp a woman in her entirety. That was fatal.”

“One last time – yes or no?”

“Yes, for God’s sake, yes, yes, yes, there is nothing more I long for than to know what the lesson was that your blessed mother taught you!”

“Once my mother drew a comparison to explain how you played a suspension before a chord at the end of a piano piece.” Mr. Witzturn asks him to speak up a little. “If I think about it now,” Levadski clears his throat, “I can now see that the comparison she drew at the time was to become a metaphor for my little life.” Levadski waits in vain for Mr. Witzturn to ask what kind of comparison it was, coughs and carries on: “The piece I was playing was nearing the end, the finish was a soft melancholy minor, but I just wanted to be done and so I played it with equal impatience, something my mother was not at all happy about. Look, she said, up there on the mountain there is a mighty gate in front of a beautiful castle. You are a messenger, riding towards that gate. From a great distance you can hear the old wooden gate snapping shut into its lock. That is the way you are meant to play the suspension.”

“To your mother!” Mr. Witzturn raises his glass, bows his head and fortunately only stabs his cheek with his straw. “Only I don’t see what the lesson to be learned consists of.”

“In the metaphor, Mr. Witzturn, in the metaphor.”

“In the metaphor for what? And what does it have to do with your life? A beautiful castle, a gate snapping shut?”

“My little life,” Levadski mumbles, “yes, my life, perhaps she wanted to make me the gift of a metaphor, as a greeting, as a dowry for my future, and I, I don’t know what …”

A soft neighing can be heard coming from Mr. Witzturn’s chest. His mouth is closed, the corners are pointing at the peanuts that have missed his mouth and are now mostly lying on the floor, crushed. By the light of the candles they look like the bone splinters of tiny skulls.

“Down there,” Levadski points to the peanuts, “down there, there are little people. It is grotesque, almost perverse, to deny the existence of gnomes. Fairy tales do not lie. They exist. Down there!”

“Come off it,” Mr. Witzturn neighs.

“Don’t you notice something?”

“Oh, what!”

“That we are shooting upwards in our chairs? And the earth has after all turned out to be a disc.”

“I will have another Cosmonaut Cocktail.” Levadski clutches his head. A woman’s round face with a crimson pout is sitting on Mr. Witzturn’s chair.

“Here I am!”

“Oh, there you are,” Levadski breathes with a sigh of relief, “for a moment I lost my bearings and thought you were the young woman who sat down beside me.”

“The castle in the distance, the mighty gate, the lock snapping shut, the castle, the gate …,” Mr. Witzturn repeats expectantly.

“Well,” Levadski scratches his head. “The metaphor of the castle … hm. I knew it a moment ago. How exasperating,” he moans, “a moment ago I knew it, and now, now that I want to talk about it, it has escaped me.”

“Fine, another time then,” Mr. Witzturn sighs.

“I’ve got it!”

“Yes?”

“Hhm. A moment ago I had it.”

“Should I perhaps explain to you how I see it with the castle and the gate in your life?” Levadski has no objection. Mr. Witzturn blinks a few times and begins to talk.

“Don’t be offended, but in my eyes the metaphor of the closing gate seems quite trivial.”

“What do you see?” A glob of saliva gets stuck in Levadski’s windpipe. He grips fast to the bar while coughing.

“The image of the mighty gate falling shut …” Mr. Witzturn is chewing on his lower lip, “it could be death your blessed mother wanted to prepare you for.” Levadski’s eyes light up. “And that as a human being you should not be too surprised if you find yourself standing in front of this mighty gate one day.” Levadski’s cheeks are on fire. “If it was not a lesson, it was definitely a sign, a sign to raise the spirits. From one person to another. Now you have heard it from a stranger. The way you wanted to.” Levadski’s chin nods and drops to his chest like a wilted leaf on a snow-covered pond. Beneath his shirt, spring arrives. “You know everything yourself …”

“A Cosmonaut Cocktail for the lady.”

“How pretty, it even has a sugared lemon slice … A ring of Saturn!” The white face is enchanted.

“A foreigner,” in Mr. Witzturn’s opinion.

“Like all of us,” whispers Levadski.

“I am writing a book about an old man,” the young lady with the Cosmonaut Cocktail tells the bartender. “A lonely old man returns to the city of his childhood in order to die there, so that the circle is complete.”

“That sounds like a fascinating story,” the bartender says with a frosty expression.

“Here, in this bar,” says the pale female cosmonaut, “my hero squanders his wealth, everything he has. That’s why I need to try all the cocktails an aged gentleman would order. For example, cocktails that were popular in his youth.”

“Allow me to make a remark,” the bartender says. “An older gentleman would more likely sit at a table over there by the window or very close to the piano. The bar would not be the place for him.”

“A foreigner,” Levadski hears Mr. Witzturn mumble. “And still no electricity.” Whether I keep my eyes open or closed is really beside the point, thinks Levadski, I am fine. I am fine. Fine …

“It depends on how old the hero of your novel is. For example, a Cosmonaut Cocktail like that would have been popular in the sixties.” The bartender appears to be speaking out of a Millésimé champagne bottle.

“I presume,” says the young lady, sounding out of a Finlandia bottle, “that my fellow compatriot Gagarin made a contribution towards the naming of the cocktail.”

“The first man in space,” echoes from the bartender’s secret glass cubbyhole.

“She is from the Soviet Union,” Mr. Witzturn growls into Levadski’s ear, making his lids flutter.

“I don’t know,” the Russian says, “whether he really was the first man in space.”

The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, Levadski wants to say to Mr. Witzturn, but to do so he would have to open his eyes. Or his mouth. The bartender’s laughter sounds like an explosion of sparkling bubbles.

“But there was nobody out there before your fellow countryman.” Levadski imagines one of the bartender’s eyes swimming up the neck of the bottle.

“I don’t know,” the female cosmonaut repeats stubbornly, “whether Gagarin was the first man in space. Perhaps there were other creatures there long before him. For example, after they decided to leave our planet for particular reasons.”

“For what reasons?” the bartender wants to know.

“To give the apes a chance, I would say.”

“Clever, very clever,” the bartender is amused, “perhaps these apes were meant to follow the example of the first true cosmonauts and give the animals a chance?”

“I plead for the horses,” says the Russian. Before we all fly to Mars, we should put the horses in the right light.” The bartender finds dogs more exciting. May dogs rule!

“Most of them are overbred,” the Russian objects, “and besides, dogs are half human. Too spoiled. Wolves would be better, because,” the Russian deliberates, “they are the apes of the dog world.”

“May the wolves populate our cities,” the bartender cheers, “drive our cars! May …”

“A clear-thinking wolf would keep its paws off our civilization,” Mr. Witzturn interrupts. The bartender places his hand on the shaker. It immediately fogs up, and he remains in that position, sucking in his lips. A veil of perfume wafts into Levadski’s face.

“A dense forest with ivy, ferns and mosses, of course,” the Russian replies, “that would be a wolf civilization.” Mr. Witzturn laughs.

“The forests are dying! I am afraid your wolf will have to learn to drive our cars.”

“It will not do so under duress,” the Russian counters, “it will carry out its business on the arid land until a magnificent forest carpets over it, even if it has to give its life in return!”

A true poet, thinks Levadski.

“Gimlet, Hot Toddy, Americano, Mai Thai,” the bartender hisses, as if he were enflamed in wild hatred against the cocktails. “Bourbon Highball, Harvey Wallbanger, Sours, White and Black Russian, to summarize. Very popular in the sixties: Pimm’s Cocktail, Screwdriver, Mojito, Milk Punch, Vodka was newly discovered. To have a bar at home also became fashionable at that time.”

“I remember,” Mr. Witzturn croaks, “the stiff cocktail parties where I stood until I was ready to drop and religiously kissed housewives’ moisturized hands. Hungry and dazed, I bit into their sausage fingers and scratched my mouth on their precious stone rings. There was nothing to eat, just masses of cocktails mixed by the gentleman of the house. That’s the way we created the foundation for our own conservation, isn’t that so Mr., er …” Levadski smiles at Mr. Witzturn through closed eyes. “I was never a party animal, Mr., er …”

“I suggest we drink a cocktail from our youth. Maestro!” Mr. Witzturn says in a weak voice. “What did they drink during the war?”

“In wartime there was no time for sophisticated drinking,” Levadski interjects.

“Then let’s drink something from the sixties.” The bartender recommends Cuba Libre. Lime, white rum, Coke and a Caribbean zest for life.

“I’ll pass,” says Mr. Witzturn, twiddling a bent straw between his fingers, “to me Cuba Libre sounds like a disrespectful belittlement of revolutionary ideals.”

“But my dear Mr. Witzturn, the time of revolutions is over. At least it is for us.”

“Once more you are mistaken, dear Mr. Levadski. Nobody should underestimate revolution’s contribution to the improvement of the decline of the world, nor should we. We are …”

Mr. Witzturn scratches his temple as if in so doing new ideas could trickle out. “There is no doubt that we are on the verge of a new revolution.”

“Strange,” Levadski shrugs his shoulders, “I am not sensing anything of this revolution.”

“Not surprising,” Mr. Witzturn laughs hoarsely. “It is a subtle revolution, one the people really need.”

“Which people?”

“In the first instance, our occidental people. Oh,” Mr. Witzturn purses his lips in pleasure, “a Romantic age is dawning, the time of the Neoromantics, an age that will make the Enlightenment and the embarrassing turbulence of the last century seem like a bundle of dried forest mushrooms.”