Who Is Martha? (5 page)

“My father was happy, he knew the joy of living!” Levadski shouted to the children in the village, when he believed he was met with a pitying look. Their fathers were farmers, blacksmiths, bakers and butchers, some, in the worst cases, had died in war, were crippled or missing. These children were to be pitied, not him, for his father had known the joy of living. In the evenings their mothers sent them to the tavern to fetch their fathers home from drinking. Levadski would linger close by, leaning against a wall. He was more proud than sad that his father was unable to stagger out of the tavern. He knew the joy of living, he shouted in his head at the children clutching their fathers’ arms, Oh yes, he knew it.

“One day you too will know the birds,” Levadski’s mother promised. And one day this really was the case. Levadski knew them all, and he knew: the joy of living had nothing to do with the bullet his father had fired into his brain. This joy of living conjures up a space for a candid, totally unimpeded joy, smack in the middle of human destiny. This space floats within us like a bubble, and pleasure, its contents, absolves us from everything – our sins, our mistakes, it even pardons the most wretched end. One day Levadski was familiar with the birds and understood: once you have given yourself to the inhabitants of the sky, you are doomed to happiness. You can then happily fire a bullet into your brain.

In August, shortly before the fateful Battle of Amiens, Levadski could brush his teeth with tooth powder all by himself. The young widow decided to lock up the forest warden’s house and to return to Vienna aboard a hospital train. Levadski watched as she took her axe and lopped the heads off all the hens and the old cock. The only reason why the birds had not landed in the stomachs of the marauding fighters in the interest of the right cause was because they had been kept in deep bunker-like cellars during the war years and not in the stable. Only at night, if you held an ear to the cold kitchen floor, could you hear them softly lamenting in their sleep. Singing, Levadski’s mother loaded the carcasses of the birds onto the wheelbarrow and wheeled them, to a melancholy warbling tune, into the village to exchange them for gold with the neighbors. “Eat and remember us,” Levadski’s mother said at every threshold. Levadski wanted to say “Eat and remember us” in front of the last door, but nobody opened. So Levadski said it in front of the closed door.

“Died of starvation,” explained Levadski’s mother, who knew to interpret the sweet smell of decay as the old Jew’s last greeting, “the poor little grandfather.” They headed back. The last hen reproachfully puffed up the sack in the widow’s hand. The old man was dead. Levadski wanted to know why.

“Did he not have anyone to cook for him?”

“He was a widower, just like I am a widow.”

“What does that mean?”

“The male version of me. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“So if I am a widow, he is a widower, you see, an extended version of widow.”

“Why couldn’t the widower eat at the neighbors’?”

“Because he knew they didn’t like him.”

“Why?”

“Because he was not only a widower, but also an old Jew.”

“What is an old Jew?”

“An old Jew is a colorful bird. Remember the bird feeder we made out of fence posts last winter,” Levadski’s mother said, “and the two types of birds that always came to peck the kernels from the stand? The birds are called chickadees and nuthatches. Remember the way it was: the chickadee that was always there didn’t want the other chickadee to eat any of the food and he pounced on his fellow bird. The chickadee left the nuthatches to eat in peace. It’s the opposite with humans. They want to eat together. Birds of a different species are a thorn in their eye.”

“But they are all birds!” shouted the little Levadski.

“Humans, you mean,” his mother corrected him. “Oh, I don’t understand anything anymore myself!”

When Levadski reached the forester’s house with his mother, a veil had descended over the conversation. When he bent over the steaming chicken broth, the conversation about birds and humans sank like a chestnut in a mirrored lake. And when he sat in a train for the first time, between whimpering soldiers with bandaged arms, legs and heads, the picture of the widower behind the closed door was no longer even a circle of water in the pond of his memory.

Behind his mother’s aunts was the stale air of their apartment, a silent third presence. Levadski greeted all three of them on the threshold with a bow and stumbled in. “This is where we are going to live,” Levadski’s mother announced, her eyes moist.

Several times a week Levadski ate cake with his great-aunts in the most beautiful hotel in Vienna. He ate cake until he had grown eight inches, he ate it for three whole years. After cake, Levadski devoured the golden sound of music. In the Golden Hall of the
Musikverein
, a few steps from the hotel, he was steeped in a pleasure even sweeter than chocolate cake.

IV

W
HILE
L
EVADSKI
’
S MOTHER CHANGED THE DIAPERS OF
elegant ladies’ children and took them out for walks in their strollers in the fresh air, Levadski’s great-aunts dragged the unexpected consolation of their old days into the
Musikverein
. On a thinly upholstered chair with his short legs dangling, he listened on long evenings to symphonic works, to concerts for piano and orchestra, for solo piano, for piano duets and for two pianos. He listened to secular and religious choral pieces with and without orchestra, and learned to appreciate the benefits of the cheapest balcony seats directly above the orchestra. The paneled ceiling formed a kind of resonant expanse that seemed to intensify the music, to gather it and hurl it down on nobody but Levadski.

“We are sitting in the belly of an architectural masterpiece,” the great-aunts whispered to Levadski with sour breath. Solemn, for the golden notes of the hall were solemn, the blue ceiling fresco with Apollo’s nine muses, the cool white of the sculptures above the balcony doors. Solemn were the movements of the violinists when they dabbed their beads of perspiration, solemn were the embroidered initials on their chin cloths. Incredibly solemn were the tear-stained faces of the music lovers that Levadski could see from his cheap seat, shimmering in the discreet light of the crystal chandeliers: all the red noses that acquired a prophet-like dignity in these solemn surroundings.

“You will understand it one day,” the sour breath of the great-aunts assured him. Levadski already understood now that music had to be a question of magic – what other possible explanation could there be for the two sisters seeming less ugly when the music began to play? Even during the intermissions it was an ugliness sugared in a soft golden dust that they radiated. The music itself was perfume! It smelled of the powder of his aunts’ décolletées leaning over the balustrade, like polished brass plate and the sweat of the musicians.

While a rattling Rachmaninoff swept across the stage and the blurry-eyed music buffs wiped their noses, Levadski leaped through sun-drenched meadows of flowers, embraced thousand-year-old trees, nimbly flitted up their resinous trunks and drowned in oceans filled with fish. He couldn’t know that one day music would be reduced to a three-tiered smell in his head. To the smell of powder, brass and sweat.

There sat Levadski, leaning against a cool pillar. When the music excited him too much, he would gently knock his head against the pillar. Most of the time a lady with binoculars sat next to him, taking up two seats. Through her binoculars she looked down on the oily bald heads of the double bass players and smiled mysteriously or licked her painted red lips. During the intermission she made up for her two cheap seats with a caviar canapé. When she directed her binoculars at the double bass players again after the intermission, a dark caviar egg hung in her smile. Right next to her sat an old man napping behind the pearly sheen of a pair of pince-nez. During brass-filled sections he would start up and finger his tailcoat – he was here. He was. He was he. And again sweet slumber beckoned – the old man succumbed to reveries until the next brass attack. Opposite Levadski on the other side of the concert hall a young emaciated girl sat swaying, opera glasses in hand. To the right and left of her, women with gray chignons were dozing. Beneath her were surging waves of the educated middle class with starched collars of a white immune to any kind of criticism in the subdued light.

“They used to crack open bottles of champagne here,” one of the great-aunts sighed, “I miss the popping.” Her breath drove into Levadski’s left nostril in the form of a sour pickle.

“Much better,” her sister whispered, “this way you can enjoy the intensity of the music more.” And a second sour pickle blocked Levadski’s right nostril. How blissfully he sneezed in the
Musikverein
! How blissful the pain of the repressed sneezing and the subsequent goose bumps!

It was in the
Musikverein
that Levadski for the first time also heard the conflicting descriptions that the music lovers gave to the music. Mouths concealed behind hands, leaning towards each other or sitting upright with glassy mad eyes directed at the orchestra, they declared of the music:

“Heavenly tootling!”

“Excruciating whining.”

“Shush …”

“A spicy butchery of melodies.”

“Vile harmonics, but interesting.”

“Incredibly inflated. Still, nice instrumental effects.”

“Deathly boring – the same rhythm over and over again.”

“Be quiet!”

“A charming mess!”

Invisible occurrences were also noted.

“The double basses are dragging themselves laboriously.”

“The violins are skulking.”

“The blaring trumpets doubling up on the violins.”

The music itself was inspired to action.

“But now, hop, hop, hop!”

“Stab and pull! Stab and pull!”

“Heeey, heeey get on with it!”

And many ambiguous notions were uttered in a state of euphoria.

“One wall of thunder after the other, how refreshing!”

“The indulgences of this genius transcend the spheres.”

“Sugared water on my head, Lotte, I am flying!”

It was obvious: only a lover was capable of speaking about music like this, someone who really knew it. Levadski was surrounded by pure music lovers. Withered ladies with glittering dangling earrings belonged to this circle of lovers, youngsters with red cheeks and long aching fingers belonged, too. Sobbing chambermaids in plain dresses were friends of music, and even the clergy rolled their eyes up at the hollow paneled ceiling, grateful for music on earth and the gift of hearing.

The progenitors of music appeared to be the musicians on the stage. Damned to eternal reproduction, they were in the child Levadski’s eyes nothing but soulless puppets.

It was not difficult to guess what the conductor’s role was: the gate through which the sacred composer protruded his dragon’s tongue. For the duration of a symphony, a concerto or a piano concert, the conductor appeared to relinquish his body and his personality. The conductor’s pitted shell allowed something better than itself to rule and triumph. But on closer observation this turned out not to be the case. The conductor did after all inhabit his body. The reason for his writhing like a person possessed was frighteningly mundane: because he was torn back and forth between having to control himself and at the same time having to forget himself. The conductor was meant to follow the composer’s blueprint but also his own ideas, his volatile temperament and the moment. Whom to do justice to? The composer, the audience, or himself? How could you not go mad in the process?

“The director of an orchestra,” one of the great-aunts informed Levadski, “is a bureaucrat responsible for the correct measure, nothing more.”

“An intelligent windmill rooted to the spot who’ll never fly,” her sister added.

Filled with sympathy, Levadski looked at the conductor, a mortal being, permanently in danger of slipping on the conductor’s podium and toppling off in the heat of battle and besmirching the immortal music on account of his mortification. The pianist, the conductor’s fellow sufferer, fared better in that respect: being seated, she was unable to stumble.

Where was the composer, Levadski wanted to know from his great-aunts. “Everywhere, my child, everywhere!” Levadski looked and marveled. Most of the time the composer, a curly-haired seraph, sat on God’s shoulder, smiling bashfully at his much celebrated failings.

“It’s getting exciting down there,” the sisters said, speaking through their noses, their blurry gaze directed at the front rows in the hall. From the lofty perch of their cheap seats in the organ balcony they were in a good position to speak, for they knew its advantages: the view and the movement – everything that you couldn’t deny yourself as a true music lover.

“Down there they don’t get to experience the movement at all,” they whispered in Levadski’s ear. “… Not real music lovers … A load of philistines. They don’t even dare to cough, sitting there rusting in their patent leather shoes, all in the first rows for the sake of being seen, stiff and empty as they are … Pitiful!”

“In the old days,” the sisters enthused, “champagne corks flew through the air, people joked and laughed to their heart’s content, you paid the neighboring box a visit, a little tête-à-tête, a kiss on the hand, oh, and now? Now, without the bubbly, we have stepped slightly closer to the music …,” remembering they were speaking in front of the innocent child Levadski. “Only the vanities remain the same old ones,” they added.

From up high, Levadski marveled at all these people who monopolized his great-aunts’ music. They must, Levadski suspected, have arrived at the enjoyment of music through a stroke of fate and forced the real music lovers into the cheap, if marvelous, seats in the balconies over-looking the stage by the organ. The pain of an unendurable loss could be seen in the hangdog expression on the two sisters’ faces, precisely where the hangers-on sported a smile. This pain was of such magnitude that even the rays of music, the reason everyone was gathered here in the Golden Hall of the
Musikverein
, could not properly warm Levadski’s great-aunts. Not least because they appeared to be continuing a silent battle from their organ balcony – the right of the firstborn had to be put on display for all to see, as an unmistakable pedagogic greeting to everyone down there. The aunts were only able to relax during the intermissions, in the circle of the old elite.