Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

  “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

  WHILE LEVADSKI’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.

  “At last among the like-minded!” the sisters sighed on the way to the buffet, wiping the dust from the marble steps with the hems of their shabby dresses. With a dignified impatience, holding Levadski by the hand, they hurried towards the people who understood music. They recognized each other from a distance, intimated a bow or a kiss on the hand; ladies wearing arm-length gloves shook each other’s hands. You could see the sparkle of pocket watches on gold chains, wilting carnations in the buttonholes of gentlemen gave off a barely perceptible scent, so heavy were the clouds of perfume of the supposedly weaker sex who had done their best to dress up to the nines. People conversed during the intermissions as if this were the last opportunity to impart something of essence to the world. The topic of conversation was music; after all it brought the old elite together, veterans of an out-and-out lost and futile war. A folding fan dropped to the parquet floor, was picked up with a smile and a slight creaking of the spine, people continued to converse about music. People offered toasts to the music.

  This group of people was even more suspect to Levadski than their opponents who, with champagne glasses filled to the brim, skirted around the island of the elites, as if they were ashamed of the course that history had taken. Levadski found it difficult to distinguish between the true and the false music lovers, for both clans were equally convinced of their love of the art. The hangers-on gave the impression of being clueless and inquisitive, which made them a little more sympathetic in Levadski’s eyes than those who were of his great-aunts’ ilk, so immersed in their knowledge of the essence that there seemed to be no room for music itself in their emotional life. In spite of this, Levadski’s passion for music was kindled by these partially unintelligible conversations in the buffet hall of the Musikverein, in between the canapés with carefully counted caviar roe and the tinkling drops of crystal chandeliers warmed by the breath of the people, slowly circling around themselves. The Musikverein hall was gold, the pearls of the champagne were a dusty gold in the flutes, like wax candles forming a circle around the speaker with the gold tooth in his mouth. Levadski listened to him, hanging on every word. Like crumbs of gold, the man scattered his words into the circle of altar boys and girls holding wax candles in their hands.

  “How, ladies and gentlemen, can music free itself from its fetters? From which fetters?, the eyes of the youngster (Levadski ducks) ask rightly. My friend! From which fetters? The answer is simple – from the fetters of its existence as a masterpiece! Called back into life through the palpable feelings of the interpreter. But, my dear sir, the charming ladies (looking over at Levadski’s great-aunts) will object, what about fidelity to the work and the historically correct way of playing it? (Pauses for a drink, scans the circle with a mischievous glance.) Are we academic classicists? Do we belong to that pedantic breed of people who blindly believe that the work will speak for itself if the interpreter restrains his feelings and snatches those of the composer out of thin air? (Levadski’s great-aunts shake their heads decisively.) No, no and no again! What an absurd thought! How, if not by means of a tender heart, is the musician meant to understand the composer? It is only through the living, through our presence, that the idea of a work can be realized. But (the prophet raises a chubby forefinger) how to play, in particular the younger ones among us ask (looking at the shrinking Levadski), in order to do the composer justice? Let us forget, dear friends, (conciliatory nodding of the head) our misgivings about the personal touch. A respectful virtuoso will never vainly abuse it. Where would that get us, yes, where would that get us? (Pauses for a drink, absent-minded wiping of the moustache.) The composer is dead! (Fixed stare into the circle.) Yet for as long as he lived, he found consolation in this one thought: his music will outlive him and be played by generations to follow. Irrespective of the personal touch, the music has survived the composer. Ladies (pause) and gentlemen, it is only, I repeat, it is only when it is in harmony with our time that music is alive and able to move us deeply. (Small outbreak of applause with a confused Levadski at its head.) And I am most decisively saying this aloud to all the academic classicists!”

  “Bravo!” the great-aunts shouted. It was not in the hall, but during the intermissions, when speeches like this were bandied about, that they truly seemed to
come alive.

  “In the time of our grandfathers, everything was played according to their own perception of it,” a heavily powdered beauty from times gone by announced. “The adaptation by a virtuoso was considered more significant that the original score!” Levadski’s great-aunts nodded, gazing into the distance with nostalgia.

  “And then our grandfathers died, and our fathers suddenly stood there lost,” said her grace, waving her bony arms. “As if burdened by a curse, people started to play in a historically faithful manner – the slightest whim of the composer, however absurd, was maintained, even transcription errors in the first edition were celebrated as being ingenious and accepted!”

  “God forbid,” the great-aunts murmured, and Levadski was on the verge of making the sign of the cross. The caviar canapé tasted good because it looked like a glade filled with enlarged bark beetle eggs.

  “Perfection became an obsession,” the old lady whispered, lowering her eyes. “No faith was placed in chance, in a person’s own nature …”

  “And music itself,” groaned the great-aunts, “as fleeting and unique as it is! A spider’s web in flight!” And then slightly tearfully to Levadski, “Although it is only possible to harness the music if you let it fly!”

  “Our grandfathers were still able to do that,” the powdered lady sighed at the stuccoed ceiling of the buffet hall, “then our fathers were conceived.”

  “I remember,” one of the great-aunts recollected, “my – our – father, praising an interpreter by calling his style harsh!”

  “Delightful!” her sister said, pinching Levadski’s hollow cheek, “now everything has changed!”

  At another table a conversation was going on about the interpreter’s behavior towards the composer’s authority. “Passive recipient or generous servant of the composer – that is the question!