Who Is Martha? (7 page)

My Dear Son,

Far be it from me to waste the valuable time of a future scholar with complaints that you seldom write home. The reason why your old mother has reached for her pen is an entirely different one. I ask you to open your eyes, ears and your good little heart now and acknowledge the contents of this letter in all seriousness.

My son, something is brewing in this world. The non-migratory birds like the crested lark, wren and the common treecreeper have turned their backs on our little place, the forest and the fields. There is no sign of the house martin either. House sparrows are now nesting under the eaves. I can no longer remember the last time I saw a house martin standing before a puddle, stuffing mud into its cheeks as building material for its nest, it was such a long time ago.

All these signs, my son, as you yourself know, are alarming. Our dear father would have said: the rats are leaving the sinking ship. He would have been right.

For months I have been dreaming the same dream almost every night. A green woodpecker is building its breeding nest in our china cupboard. In my dream I know this is a great honor and fortune, but I am not happy about the visitor. I am worried about our best stoneware dinner service that has outlived your father, the decline of the monarchy and four years of war, even our three-year absence. I think about this and feel rotten – a green woodpecker is nesting beneath our roof and I am thinking of the wretched dinner service and unable to enjoy the important guest! From time to time I hear the laughter of the bird from the china cupboard, which sounds like gluckgluckgluck. Sometimes I see the long woodpecker’s tongue, darting back and forth through the keyhole. It is sticky and encrusted with the crumbs of white stoneware.

This dream doesn’t bode well either. A Flood is nearly upon us. This is clear to me, and it should be clear to you, too. What I would like is for you to drop everything and come home straight away. Your old mother will deal with the rest. If you pronounce me mad and don’t take this letter seriously, I will, as God is my witness, follow in your father’s footsteps.

Levadski read the letter, put it down on the bed and scratched his neck with both hands. A strange woman. He picked up the letter again and read it once more. “My Dear Son, Far be it from me …”

“Damn it!” Levadski swore at the paper-thin wall, where an old photograph and a sketch depicting two rheumatic lumberjacks bowing to each other were hanging. He got up and straightened the frames. In the photograph, Levadski’s father sat on the box of a carriage, with a full head of hair and no beard. A shaggy dog of indeterminate breed was sleeping on his lap. Levadski’s mother was resting her beautiful head on his right arm. The sketch depicted a cuckoo perched on a rustic wooden table with an egg in its open beak, set against the backdrop of an enchanted rococo scene, a wildly overgrown arbor, a swing and thunderclouds in the distance. At the bottom right stood the year of Levadski’s birth beside his father’s signature:
Landscape with cuckoo, nothing special, but with the deepest affection for my little dove. Your little dove forever.

Levadski straightened the pictures again and took a step back. “No,” he said, taking the pictures off the wall and placing them in the open jaws of his suitcase. He also packed his best Sunday shirt and the folder with his thesis concerning the numerical deficiency of Corvidae.

When he was already seated in the third class carriage between clucking sacks of hens and little old sleeping grannies, he remembered he had forgotten to register for the approaching banding of the kingfishers in the Carpathians. “Never mind,” Levadski sighed, closed his eyes and, insofar as the hard backrest of his seat would permit, drifted into the memory of the last banding of this magnificent bird he had been allowed to participate in. He thought of the outstretched invisibly thin net and how he touched the trembling animal for the first time. In that moment, the bird was a single heartbeat. Levadski smiled in his half sleep. After banding, the bird was completely tame and sat pensively for a while on the back of his hand. Months later a bird like this would be captured by an Egyptian colleague or found dead. Thanks to the band number it was known that kingfishers from the Carpathians flew over Turkey to the brackish water of Lake Burullus in the northerly Nile Delta, to spend the winter there. This is what they did, had done since the last ice age, and would continue doing, until something intervened.

The sack beside Levadski’s left leg started to crow. Without opening her eyes, the little old granny opposite him gave the sack a kick. Something made Levadski think he would miss this year’s banding of the birds.

With pins and needles in his legs, Levadski stepped off the train. On the deserted platform two male dogs were fighting in a puddle. As Levadski passed, they sprayed him with dirt and bombarded him with abuse; in his imagination, with words of an obscene nature.

To his great surprise, the village road was paved. There was a tree missing in front of the forester’s house. Whether it had been a nut, an apple, or a plum tree, Levadski could no longer remember, no matter how hard he tried. At one of the windows sat his mother, wrapped in a white lace curtain like a bride, almost exactly as he had left her a year ago. The house seemed to have shrunk since then and grown into the earth. Or was his mother sitting on a stool to make the wait more comfortable?

Inside the house it smelled of onion tart, Levadski’s favorite dish. The crumbs in the corner of his mother’s mouth fell to the ground the second she smiled at him. Whistling, Levadski washed his hands in a bowl. He dried himself on an elaborately embroidered towel and wondered why his mother had put out one of her wedding linens. She had never before made everyday use of anything from her dowry. Hidden in a heavy wooden chest, she had saved the treasures for an uncertain future and spread them out on the lawn every few years to bleach them. And now?

Levadski stared in dismay at the brown imprint of his hands on the old linen. “It doesn’t matter,” his mother murmured cheerfully, “that’s what it’s there for!” Levadski felt a shiver run down his spine.

While he ate the onion tart he noticed a small suitcase leaning against his own near the coat rack. Levadski had great trouble swallowing his mouthful of tart. “What is that?” he said, pointing at the coat tree.

“Our suitcases,” said Levadski’s mother, wetting a fingertip and gathering two crumbs from the table that had fallen off Levadski’s plate.

“You are like the green woodpecker from your dream,” Levadski tried joking. Both gave a forced laugh.

“Yes, I have been having bad dreams lately, but they are exciting,” Levadski’s mother said. “I am glad you took your old mother’s letter seriously. And why did you?”

Levadski shrugged his shoulders. In his head the sentences were all muddled: I have always taken you seriously, mother. The image of you rotting away for months in the forest would interfere with the writing of my thesis. The disappearance of the house martins is an ominous sign …

“Why not?” Levadski said dryly. The onion tart sat like a stone in his stomach. He waited without looking at his mother for her to start talking.

“My dear child, your father was a wonderful man. We got to know each other in the woods where you were born and grew up. He never left these woods for as long as he lived. Don’t think it is easy for me to leave them. I came here as a student from Vienna, together with three young professors, for the East Galician bird census a few years before your birth. The old count, for whom your father worked as a forest warden, was a great bird fanatic. You already know this. During the breeding season his manor house and his estates were always open to bird lovers – this was known throughout Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. Even two nephews of the Tsar, may they rest in peace, regularly came to visit. Your father came to collect us from the railway station in a carriage. He loaded up our suitcases with such a scornful expression on his face that I nearly peed in my pants with laughter – I was one of the few women who wore them in the empire. Don’t ask me why. In spite of this, your father fell in love with me. And your father won my heart completely when a bird alighted in the branches of a birch in front of our window. It was a common blackbird, we were a couple, I no longer wore trousers, but dresses, though in that moment I was naked, so was your dear father, by the way. You don’t need to scratch your neck now. Well, when the bird alighted on the birch and obliged us with its territorial song, your father froze. He lay on top of me, listening to the bird, without blinking. He listened to the blackbird he couldn’t see. He listened so intently he held his breath. And when I noticed, there was no turning back.”

Levadski could have sworn he had turned into a lump of coal. For a few seconds. Then, after a conscientious clearing of his throat, he was himself again. “When you told me you wanted to study ornithology in Lemberg, you made an old widow smile for the first time in ages,” Levadski’s mother continued. “My heart smiled like it did long ago, when your father held his breath at the song of a common blackbird. With my heart smiling, my son, I breathed a sigh of relief for the first time since his death. Do you remember, I asked you how seriously you would take your studies in the capital city with its pernicious charms and influences? I did not mention our financial situation, it would have been unnecessary, you already knew how miserable it was. You said: Mother, I take the matter very seriously. Do you remember? It was then that it became clear to me I would without a moment’s hesitation slave away for you like a cart-horse until my last drop of blood was spent. Oh, no matter what, I would have made your studies possible. What else can a mother do? My son, you made me happy back then, and now you have made me happy by coming here. Believe me, if you had not humored me, it all would have been for nothing, the life and death of your father, my life and death, the colorful dances of our ancestors, and your own life would have become a ghost ship. Believe your old mother. I, too, am taking the matter seriously.”

Levadski was glad he was sitting. Sweat was pouring down his back in icy streams. “Forgive me,” he said spitting out onto the plate the onion tart he had chewed to a pulp. “I can’t swallow,” Levadski moaned, wiping his mouth with a shaky hand. The more desperately he tried to remember the act of swallowing, the more unnatural it became.

Levadski’s mother drummed her fingers on the table and continued: “A catastrophe is on its way. The starlings and sparrows have disappeared from the surrounding villages, my son. And probably from the big cities as well, from Tarnopol, Stanislau, far away Cracow. Did you notice anything in Lemberg?”

“I can’t swallow any more!” Levadski sobbed.

“Then you will have to starve!” Levadski’s mother’s gaze drilled a hole in the plate with the spit-out puddle of pulp. Whether she was angry or deeply offended, Levadski could not say. His sudden inability to perform a basic reflex and this conversation that spelled disaster paralyzed him.

After an agonizing pause, she continued in a quiet voice:

“We need to get out of here.”

“Why?” Levadski asked.

“Because the Flood is coming,” his mother whispered, pouring him some tea. Levadski drank, and just as he realized that he’d managed to swallow without effort, his mother resumed talking.

“Where to, you probably want to ask. I am going to tell you what you already know. No, I won’t tell you. You can guess. So, where to, where is it that we are going to escape to, to get away from the Flood? What does history teach us?”

“You mean the fairytale from the Old Testament?”

“My son,” Levadski’s mother said, clearing her throat and smoothing down the invisible creases of her apron, “you may have grown up in a forester’s hut, but in an educated household nevertheless. If you are going to claim that the fairytales, myths, legends and sagas that have been painstakingly passed on from one generation to the next have nothing to do with reality, you are spitting in your old mother’s face.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, but Mo–”

“No buts! If you’re not familiar with the name Noah, think of the weaver birds in Africa. You will know them. The weavers that habitually build their nests on the riverbank sense the rain a year ahead and plan accordingly in case the river swells. If a nest is hanging high up in a tree there will be a lot of rain that year. It’s similar in the case of swallows in Japan who usually build their nests above ground level. If a typhoon year threatens flooding, they build their nests as high as they can. We too are going to move our nest to the hills. We are going to do the same as the birds. My suitcase is packed.”

“To which mountains?” Levadski groaned.

“The high mountains, my dear son.”

“I realize you are homesick and want to go skiing in the Alps,” Levadski laughed. His mother had gone crazy, there was no doubt about it. “The starlings and sparrows have disappeared, you say?”

“Great titmice, blue tits and coal tits and the ancient colony of jackdaws from the village church,” his mother said, listing them.

“I understand, I understand,” Levadski mumbled, “so where is the journey taking us?”

“To the Caucasus.” Levadski’s eyes widened. “You were thinking Mount Ararat? Your mother isn’t Noah. That would be uninspired. Have you ever heard of Chechnya?”

Levadski frowned. North Caucasus. Nothing came to mind apart from the fact that the Caucasian goldcrest was to be found there 6,500 feet above sea level, and that it was said to be lighter than the Central European goldcrest. An elegant bird with orange colored head feathers it would impressively raise when rankled.

“Sisisisisisi …,” Levadski sang gently, as if to entice the bird from the scent of the onion tart.

“Sisisi-sia!” his mother chimed in. “Everything will turn out fine,” she said, placing her hand on Levadski’s shoulder.

Everything would be fine, is what Levadski wanted to say and burst into tears. But he didn’t move. He felt like a pillar in the ruins of a palace, a pillar on which a goldcrest sits, striking up a song.