Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

” “Willing servant, no question, willing servant!

  ” The ladies smiled into their glasses, as if they hoped to find a witty turn of phrase at the bottom. The gentlemen, on the other hand, dished them out and drank to the bottom. People patted each other on the padded shoulders of their tailcoats, raising particles of dust that glowed gold in the light of the crystal chandeliers.

  A gentleman with sideburns and a red face, leaning on a bistro table, declared: “Not every grand piano and pianist can do justice to the Hammerklavier Sonata, Opus 106! (Inquisitive raising of plucked eyebrows.) Let us consider the well-known moment before the entrance of the reprise of the first movement!”

  “Oh yes!” a blushing Fräulein in respectable school-teacher-blue interjected. “Beethoven’s Érard grand piano has very little in common with the tone and variety of our grand pianos.”

  “The sound of the orchestra of his time,” a richly bejeweled matron with an unhealthy palor growled, “can hardly be compared to that of today, either.”

  “An Érard grand piano and a Steinweg! Ha!” laughed a bent old little lady with a diamond tiara, “chicken broth and goulash soup!”

  “I have a fortepiano at home that is in sore need of attention at the moment,” a faded diva remarked. “Its tone is like a cembalo, I should add …”

  “Oh, if you could just play a musical instrument with a sense of humor,” interrupted a corpulent woman of indeterminate age, “you only need think of Beethoven’s Kind, willst du ruhig schlafen! It’s hilarious!” (Long thoughtful pause, disappearance of the fat lady behind a curtain.)

  “Well,” the gentleman with the sideburns said, enlivened, “to speak of an amusing experience, I once attended a concert in a small castle during which a virtuoso interrupted his playing to throw two groaning pieces of fire-wood out into the snow. He killed two birds with one stone: the terrible racket in the fireplace and the coach-man who was unfortunate enough to be doing his business beneath the very castle window.”

  One of Levadski’s great-aunts was the first to disengage herself from the general state of shock. “What annoys me most are the lower middle classes in the hall who, in the silence of the general pause before the minuet, slide around on their chairs, cough and clean their pince-nez, totally oblivious to the reason why there is a general pause … (Waiting, a concerned glance towards Levadski.) What for? In order to create a state of motionless silence (a finger solemnly raised along with lacquered red fingernail), before the minuet deliciously and consolingly pours forth over the great lament.”

  “How anybody can be that unreceptive to music!” out-raged, giving a curt nod in the direction of where the lower middle classes were mingling. “How should they know that the silence that follows the final chord is more important than the sound that goes before it? Instead of celebrating the silence for a while, they race each other to the cloakroom.”

  “It would be best if people like that didn’t turn up here in the first place,” the man with the sideburns suggested.

  “That lot,” laughed the fat lady who had reappeared, “can’t even tell the difference between Beethoven’s pianissimo misterioso and dolce!”

  “What is the difference?” the man with the sideburns asked innocently.

  “You are having me on, my dear sir,” the fat woman smiled. “Dolce is warm gentleness. Pianissimo misterioso is a shudder of amazement. Oh, if I only think of the teasing finale of his variations!” she chirped, “of the sweeping polonaise, of the impetuous Rondo alla ingharese …”

  “Warm gentleness and a shudder of amazement,” the man with the whiskers repeated thoughtfully, “I would like to be drinking what you are!”

  “Wasn’t that amusing?” the sisters sighed on the way to the organ balcony. “What could be more intellectually stimulating than company like that!”

  At the bottom of his heart Levadski felt pity for his great-aunts. Years later, however, it was driven out by understanding and deep sympathy. The pathetic sparkle and the paltry entertainment to which the old women desperately clung could be likened to a sparsely populated lake, where a mollusk counts as half a fish. In spite of everything, it had been intellectually stimulating company, Levadski realized when he was older, intellectually stimulating by virtue of the presence of the music itself.

  V

  MORE AND MORE FREQUENTLY LEVADSKI’S MOTHER SPOKE of her yearning for honest country air, which in her opinion only still existed in Galicia. “Galicia just happens to be in Poland,” she said, “and the war has been over for years.” What spoke most in favor of a return was that Levadski had long since reached school age. “We are going back,” she announced to her aunts one evening in spring. With a bow and a kiss of the hand Levadski said farewell to the old ladies. When he turned around again on the stairs to wave, he saw that the sisters had already closed the French doors. He imagined hearing heartrending sobbing behind them, a dull thud, as if a heavy velvet curtain along with the iron curtain rod itself had fallen to the ground.

  At the age of eight, Levadski was sent to school in his homeland, which now belonged to the Second Polish Republic. In honor of this day a tough goose from the market was slaughtered and a broth made from its bones. Levadski made a pipe out of its gristly throat. Every morning, on Saturdays too, Levadski carted his heavy bag to school – which consisted of a single room – in the neighboring village. He had to learn Polish, which he did not find difficult as the son of a Little Russian.

  “Be happy,” his mother said cheerfully, “be happy, my son, for the more languages you speak, the more human you will be!” The language of birds would have sufficed for Levadski. Even as an elementary school pupil he could have sworn that the language of birds was universal, that the only difference lay in the voices of the respective birds, and that the magpie could understand the crow, just as the blackbird could understand the duck. “What about ducks who live in a different country?” Levadski’s mother asked provocatively.

  “When they meet they will talk to each other in such a way that everyone understands,” Levadski said. “Human beings should also find a common language. After all, we are animals too.”

  “That is the way it once was,” said Levadski’s mother. “Your father and I lived in a world like that. We had sub-scriptions to all sorts of bird journals: Cabanis’ Journal of Ornithology, the Zoological Garden, the Journal of the Zoological Botanical Society of Vienna, Nitzsche’s Illustrated Hunting Journal, bird conservation papers, and many others. They were all sent to us by post. We shopped at the Polish market, went to the Russian saddler, the local Jew sewed my wedding dress for me. Everything worked fine. The world was connected through trade, it was an aviary with the most diverse birds, who admired and enriched each other. We could send letters to all the countries of the globe, even to the director of the Caucasian Museum in Tiflis who was a bird lover and, moreover, a Prussian.”

  “What is a Prussian?”

  “A Prussian is also a human being!” Levadski’s mother laughed.

  And so, time passed. While Levadski’s behind was parked on the school bench in Lemberg and he ripped one pair of trousers after the other, his mother remained in the forester’s hut, planted a vegetable garden and learned Polish, so that she could subscribe to a handful of bird magazines and read them in the native tongue of the land of which she was now a citizen.

  When Levadski was in his fourth year of study and poring over his thesis concerning the numerical deficiency of Corvidae, his mother sensed that something was about to happen in the world. “A Flood is nearly upon us!” she wrote to the student Levadski at the Institute of Zoology in Lemberg.

  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 blac
kbird 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?”