Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

  Levadski took a book from the shelf and blew the dust from it. Dictionary of the Language of Ravens by Dupont de Nemours, incomplete edition. A French ornithologist colleague had hidden the facsimile inside a cake, smuggled it through the Iron Curtain in time for Levadski’s seventieth birthday. Levadski’s delight in the facsimile had gotten the better of his reason to such an extent that he kissed the Frenchman on his moustache in front of the entire professoriate. Somebody raised his glass, he could remember that, and said, “A kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt!” Everybody drank to international friendship and raven research, the words “May the day come when …” and “A clear conscience should not be a utopia” rang out. People clinked glasses and patted each other on the back. “From the primeval fish to the bird: a stone’s throw!”; “From the lungfish to the human: the bat of an eye!” They hoped he would gain many years of pleasure from this unique and scientifically speaking totally uninteresting book. His anniversary was at the same time a farewell. He left the university and the students – everything that he had never really been attached to – with the thought that he would not live much longer. “Adieu, mon ami!” Levadski had tried to joke when he stood opposite the Frenchman at the airport. The Frenchman nodded hastily and withdrew from Levadski’s brotherly kiss feigning a coughing fit. In the airplane the man with the moustache suffered a heart attack. For a time, Levadski was under the illusion that he had brought about the demise of his French colleague with his collegial kiss. If he’d explained to him that it was the custom in his country, like a weak handshake in Central Europe, perhaps the good man wouldn’t have died.

  “Such a beautiful book,” said Levadski. He said it loud enough for the other books to hear. “This, children, is how the destiny of a man fulfills itself,” Levadski continued ceremoniously. “A stranger arrives, makes a present to a stranger and gives up the ghost!” The books listened as if Levadski hadn’t already told this story twenty times. “When, you won’t believe it, on that very day, I was thinking that I would have to die soon! Such a beautiful gift …”

  Levadski opened the book and smoothed out the pages, his knuckles cracking. He made a cracking noise with every motion, he always had since he was a child. Even when he sighed or sneezed. Once he had a bout of hiccups where every hiccup was accompanied by a cracking noise and he kept on cracking. A whole day passed by like this. Levadski turned the pages of the dictionary with a great sense of pleasure.

  Kra, Kre, Kro, Kron, Kronoj

  Gra, Gres, Gros, Grons, Gronones

  Krae, Krea, Kraa, Krona, Krones

  Krao, Kroa, Kroä, Kronoe, Kronas

  Kraon, Kreo, Kroo, Krono, Kronos

  It’s a blessing I know French, thought Levadski, otherwise I would have had to learn it at the age of seventy to read this gem of a book. Simply and unassumingly the content of the language of ravens had been scraped together and distributed over twenty-seven pages, silent and powerful. Levadski remembered the bad mood he had fallen into every time he read the dictionary. Every time he stumbled over the word which suggested that man, in his search for enlightenment, had possibly overlooked the decisive junction – a word from the language of ravens. Which one was it? Levadski turned the pages and felt a surge of heat creeping up his hunched back.

  Kra (quietly, deliberately, talking to himself ) – I am

  Kra (quietly, drawn out) – I am fine; or I am ready

  Kra (short staccato) – Leave me

  Kra (tenderly, coquettishly) – Hello; or Wake up; or

  Excuse the tomfoolery

  Kra (questioningly, long) – Is somebody there?

  Which word was it then?

  Krao (loud and demanding) – Hungry

  Kroa (chokingly) – Thank you, thank you so much,

  such a pleasure

  Karr (resolutely) – Adieu!

  Kro …

  Kronos! Kronos was the word! “Let us fly” in the language of ravens, chronos in Greek. Levadski shut the book. It was this junction that mankind had rushed past, past its own kinsfolk – past its brother animal. And along with it, consideration of the existence of a common primeval language had been buried! “Dear books,” Levadski said to his library, “that contemporary animal psychology stubbornly refuses to credit the higher vertebrates with the power of abstraction and a center of speech is not only a scandal. It is a disaster! The existence of a common primeval language is perfectly obvious. Tell me, does the animal give the impression of being apathetic? On the contrary, the animal looks lively and inquisitive, not because it has just laid an egg, but because it possesses language. Language …” raved Levadski, craning his neck. “Just like us the animal has named and internalized all the objects and impressions known to it. Otherwise the animal would long ago have died in isolation, darkness and silence, and even its heightened animalism would not have been able to compensate for its lack of speech. The animal has made sense of the world like we have, by naming this world!”

  Moist-eyed, Levadski shuffled along the bookshelves and continued in a more hushed tone: “When humanity started to hone its mental and manual skills and continued to improve them, a thick civilizing fog spread over us, so that we either thought ourselves close to God or abandoned by God. But, my God, how pathetic! All we ever did was widen the gap between him and us. Between the animals and ourselves.”

  Levadski spoke to his books as if to his most gifted students. “A common primeval language appears to be physiologically and philologically undisputed. But from where is philology meant to take the means to prove that animals have a faculty for speech and explore their grammar?” The approving silence of the books spurred Levadski’s eloquence on. “The day will come,” he continued, “when the dictionaries of animal language will no longer cause their authors to be taunted and ridiculed, but bring them fame and honor. The authors will demurely lower their eyes.” Slightly embarrassed, Levadski stared at the floor on which balls of dust were being driven back and forth by the draft. “Despondent because they arrived too late at the thought of recognizing in the animal an equal neighbor, a friend who can be confidently ascribed a language and an immortal soul once again, after such a long time …”

  The books maintained their silence. Let us hope it is not too late to create this bond of friendship, Levadski wanted to say, but he only thought it to himself in silence.

  II

  LEVADSKI DECIDED TO PUT ON HIS SUNDAY BEST, TO TIE his favorite bow tie with the ornate red-billed choughs on it, and to make his way into the center of town. What had to be done was clear: buy a walking stick, visit a decent pastry shop and eat cake until a stabbing pain hit him in the jaw, until he felt alive, and that his life was not such a bad one either.

  While he was getting dressed he made a host of other decisions: He would touch the waitress, if she were pretty, as if by accident. If a waiter served him, he would trip him up. He would never again call his family doctor, and if he should get in touch with him, Levadski would hang up with a spine-chilling howl. To hell with radiation therapy and all those other highly poisonous drugs. Instead, he would treat himself to a piece of chocolate cake every day in honor of his mother, a widow who, between the wars, had been in the habit of ordering chocolate cake for Levadski in Vienna’s finest hotel.

  “Yes,” Levadski said to the mirror, spit into his hand and smoothed down the only thin and fairly long strand of hair he still possessed in the direction of the nape of his neck. How had he been able to get through life without a walking stick?! No wonder he had a limp; this would never have happened if he’d had a walking stick. On the way to the bus stop Levadski stopped several times to blow his nose. He decided that right up until the day he died, he would not use checkered handkerchiefs any more, only white ones he would buy in the center of town together with the walking stick, a hat and new shirts made from one hundred percent cotton. Anything but shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons were out of the question, thought Levadski, dropping himself into a seat on the bus meant for
pregnant women and disabled people. A heavily pregnant woman sat down beside him. “I have had enough, you understand!” he said to the expectant mother, immediately turning away again; the woman was incredibly ugly. The bus stopped. Levadski got off, but he wasn’t where he wanted to be. Poppycock! He was annoyed. Now I have to struggle across Friendship Square and along the entire Cosmonauts Streeet. I should have stayed on the bus for another two stops. Oh well, fresh air and God’s blessing … merrily we roll along.

  Beneath a chestnut tree a blind man stood plucking his guitar. Levadski resolutely made a beeline for him, pointing a finger in the air. “Watch out for the chestnuts, you don’t want to get …” The blind man lowered his guitar and snarled. Levadski had stepped on his hat.

  “Shove off!” the blind man hissed in a Mediterranean accent, “or I’ll give you hell!” Levadski shrugged his shoulders and left. After a few steps he stopped and put a hand to his chest: his dentures weren’t there.

  They can only be at home, Levadski thought, suddenly feeling dog-tired. He headed in the direction of a bench, where three women with headscarves were sitting. One of them was knitting, the second was feeding a hobbling pigeon, the third was reading. Levadski intimated a bow and, coughing, took a seat beside the woman who was reading. “Hurray,” said Levadski, wiped the sweat from his brow and peered into the book the old woman next to him was reading. “All the more remarkable is the constant temperature of just below 95 degrees in the brood nest of the bees. We can observe that in cold weather conditions the worker bees gather close together on the brood comb, covering the brood cells with their bodies, like little feather beds, thereby ensuring the minimum amount of heat loss possible; when it is very hot we see them sitting on the comb, fanning their wings …”

  Levadski was moved. He would have liked to shake the hand of the old lady with the bee book, as if she were an accomplice. With the left side of his body Levadski sensed that the woman was smiling. He felt her smile like a small blazing glow. He closed his eyes. His old friend the robin redbreast with the tick close to its eye sprang to his mind.

  “Are you smiling because I just said hurray?” he asked, opening his eyes.

  “Yes,” said the lady and burst into an ominous fit of coughing. “Excuse me,” she choked, “a crumb.” The pigeon with the leg injury took a couple of steps backwards and stared at the coughing woman with distrust.

  “Friendship Square used to be a treasure of the town,” Levadski said. “It was at its most beautiful in winter. We youngsters would come here with buckets of water, lay down a patch of ice in front of the Monument to the General and skate to our heart’s content.” The coughing woman closed her book and kept on clearing her throat. Levadski took the opportunity to squint over at the title of the book. Intelligible Science: On the Life of Bees. The lady knitting and the lady who had befriended the pigeon made a point of looking away. Levadski sighed. How many girls had he kissed under the supervision of the General. On the neck like a bloodsucker. Yes, Friendship Square had been something special once; every blind man would have been pleased to be warned by caring fellow citizens of the falling chestnuts. And now? Ingratitude wherever you looked!

  “You know,” he said to his bench companion, “I used to think that people who said ‘Everything used to be different’ were dreadful. Now such people are brothers and sisters to me!”

  A couple, closely entwined, wandered past the bench, looking like an animal on four hind legs. The open shoe-laces of their shoes whipped to the left and right, throwing up dust. “You wouldn’t have seen a thing like that in my day,” Levadski said in a purposely loud voice. The couple stopped, kissed and moved on. “Disgusting!” Levadski grumbled and licked his lips. The missing dentures were giving him a hard time. Slowly his muscles were starting to ache from talking. He was not used to talking so much. Five or six words directed at himself were usually the daily norm. The General was enthroned on his mighty horse. A magpie relieved itself on the man’s uncovered head, its wings and tail feathers iridescent. “Chacker chacker,” the magpie called and cumbersomely flew onto the tip of a fir tree close by. “A pretty animal,” said Levadski, then turned to his neighbor and saw that she was gone. The woman with the knitting and the pigeon-lady had turned into two smoking students.

  Levadski got up and continued on his way. What I desperately need is a stick with a silver handle, he thought while crossing Friendship Square, a silver handle where the evening sun can play. My God, all the things I have missed in my life! His mood improved with every cobble-stone he left behind him. Now and again he stopped and wiped the sweat from his face. He leaned against traffic light poles while waiting for them to turn green. He avoided the underpass. He skirted around the gypsies and the newspaper vendors. Everybody else made way for him, Luka Levadski, Professor Emeritus of Zoology. Neither respectfully, nor filled with repulsion, but mechanically, like water separating from oil. Cosmonauts Street yawned at him with its two rows of sycamore trees that led to the heart of the city; to the shops with the indispensable items: the silver walking stick, the shirts, the snow-white handkerchiefs and a fashionable bowler hat. If I don’t watch out I will turn into a dandy, Levadski thought, gleefully balling his wrinkled hands into fists in his trouser pockets. He felt a tear welling up inside of him, round and large like a diving bell. Covered in sweat, Levadski got into a taxi. “To the end of the street, please,” he said to the raised eyebrows of the taxi driver in the rear mirror, and leaned back with a wheezing sigh.

  In response to the buxom saleslady’s question as to what size he was, Levadski shrugged his narrow shoulders and asked to be measured. “I commissioned this excellent suit I am wearing shortly after the war, in London, at the royal outfitters, for the forty-second International Ornithological Congress,” Levadski said with outstretched arms. His breath stirred one of the saleslady’s thin curls, who, lips drawn in, was taking his chest measurements. “Back then I was a little taller and didn’t have a hunch, but I was just as unspectacular in breadth as I am now.” The saleslady wet her right index finger and started turning the pages of a style catalogue. “I haven’t grown a bosom, either,” Levadski tried joking.

  “What color would you like the suit to be?” the saleslady asked, without giving him the time of day. “Dark blue, brown, black, light gray, charcoal, pinstripe, dark buttons, gold buttons?”

  “Dark blue with dark buttons, please.”

  “And the lining?”

  “Burgundy of course.”

  The saleslady disappeared behind a door in her clattering heels, shortly afterwards reappearing with a dark blue suit and an older colleague. The lady explained to him that fashionable suits did not have a burgundy lining but were either dark gray or old rose. “Old rose would be stylish, dark gray would be more suited to business.”

  “Then I will take old rose,” said Levadski, who in times gone by would have blushed in a situation like this, in times gone by, when he found people who were in the habit of saying “in times gone by” dreadful.

  Levadski also bought a pair of suspenders, a beige scarf made of Irish pure new wool, a dark blue silk scarf with a rocking horse pattern, a silk bow tie with bright red bullfinches set against a black background, a silk tie with roseate terns and anchors, as well as ten white cambric handkerchiefs with an indecipherable monogram consisting of a multitude of curlicues. He had a hard time with the shirts. What they had in stock was checked or striped, with horrible plastic buttons. “Out of the question!” Levadski was incensed. “I have worn that cheap stuff for ninety-six years. Let me at least die in style!”

  The desire to die in luxury he had never lived in spread like wildfire within him. It grew within him and swallowed up his fear of death. The sudden desire for luxury robbed Levadski of any sense of respect for the seriousness of his situation and reduced his lung nibbled by cancer to a mere trifle.

  “My God!” Levadski moaned, “Is it so difficult to find shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons in a city of millions?”
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  The buxom saleslady grabbed the receiver. “I will call our branch office, meanwhile please take a seat.” Out of protest, Levadski leaned against the sales counter with a pain-ridden face and stared out of the window. In the to-ing and fro-ing of people in the street he noticed a big white poodle in front of a sidewalk advertising column sniffing at a poster. Moscow Circus, Parachute Jumping Kamikaze Dogs Landing On The Back Of A Lion! Come And See Our New Fall Show! The dog lifted a hind leg, signed the poster and trotted off. Levadski deliberated on what the dog had meant to say by making the gesture. To hell with art? I can do that too? Down with posters – Save the rainforest?

  “Our branch on Frantsusky Boulevard stocks shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons. With a double cuff but, unfortunately, only in white,” said the saleslady, clasping the receiver with her diamond-bedecked hand. Levadski noted with satisfaction that the telephone was an anti-quated model with a cord and dial, like the one he had at home.