Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

  Levadski’s other eye falls shut. “… Not given to everyone, our luck, a little cream soup,” his nose hair antennae inform him, then giving a little grunt, he slumps in on himself like a house of cards. The shifting of chairs revives him again. And again the house of cards falls. Again and again, until the waiter with the porcelain dentures announces into Levadski’s left ear that the restaurant is closing.

  1

  Zimmer / Room 101–128

  “YOU KNOW,” LEVADSKI SAYS, PLACING HIS HAND ON Habib’s glove, “only yesterday I was shocked to discover that I talk to my walking stick and other inanimate objects more than to animate human beings. During the night I found myself overwhelmed by another observation.” Habib peels his eyes wide open. “Yes, yes, during the night I sat up in bed and said to myself: in the few days you have been here in this hotel, you have listened to more people talking and have talked more yourself than you have in the past twenty years. Then I wanted to drink some water, but didn’t dare get up. And you know, Habib, nobody was there to help me. I am not saying this as a reproach, I realize you don’t work at night, in all my years nobody has ever brought a glass of water to my bedside, I am used to it. And yet, something like pleasure stole over me when I sat there in bed, so helpless. Pleasure at my being among people. Do you understand?” Habib nods, hesitantly withdrawing his hand. “I can now talk to my walking stick with a good conscience, you understand, Habib?”

  “You are allowed to do anything,” Habib says. There is nothing sarcastic or serious in his voice. Only clarity, lightness, goodwill.

  Levadski imagines the butler’s kid glove pressing his hand for a second, amicably, sympathetically, perhaps even with a touch of compassion. That is precisely what he is not allowed to do as a hotel butler and child of the Orient. Who knows how close a young person is allowed to get to an older person in their native land.

  “Would you like a sip of water?” Habib enquires.

  “It would probably be best if you ran me a bath,” Levadski says. Habib moves with measured steps towards the bathroom door, opens it carefully and with a flick of the hand the bathroom is bathed in the light of the chandelier, one of the few gems that Levadski would have liked to have seen in his apartment on Veteran Street.

  It would be madness to have such a thing hanging from the low ceiling of my apartment, thinks Levadski as he watches Habib let the water into the bath, it would be madness. Like a widow poor as a church mouse spending her monthly pension on a tin of caviar.

  “Bubbles or bath salts?” echoes from the vaulted bathroom.

  “Bubbles, please!” Caviar that she would smear on her face like skin cream.

  “You know …” Levadski confesses to Habib, who appears in the frame of the bathroom door. “Did you want to ask me something?”

  “No, please, go on!”

  “But you wanted to ask me something?”

  “Yes,” a smile plays around one corner of Habib’s mouth, “but after you.”

  “You know, I have a very small apartment. The living room is about the size of this bathroom. And it is full of books. I have to laugh,” Levadski smiles, “when I think of my small apartment. What would it say to this chandelier?” Levadski is searching for words.

  “It would like it,” Habib helps him out.

  “You think so?”

  “Yes, my family’s house would also like the chandelier. But whether they would become a couple, I somehow doubt it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t have any electricity in our house. Excuse me, the water.” Habib goes back to the bathtub. Levadski imagines him taking off his glove and testing the water temperature.

  “100 degrees,” says Habib in the doorframe, pointing to the blue water thermometer in his hand.

  “Correct, always correct,” Levadski says in praise and with slight regret. Perhaps genuine closeness does not consist of actual proximity – Levadski allows himself to be grabbed beneath the arms and led to the bathroom – but in the respectful distance which animals are in the habit of affording each other. It is in this distance, and not in an amorphous sticky amalgamation, that human beings are free to think of one another and still be close, to be there for each other, Levadski thinks.

  “Careful! Slippery marble,” Habib raises Levadski’s intertwined arm slightly. After all, thinks Levadski, it is impossible to exist in chaos. You need to rise above it. That’s how you maintain perspective. Time is on the side of the observer.

  “I have placed a bath towel at the head of the tub,” says Habib. That must be the only way you can decide whether you want to be there for someone else, be close to them.

  “If you need anything, just call. I am here.”

  While Levadski unbuttons his flannel pajamas, he can hear Habib fiddling with the CD player in the next room.

  “Would you like me to help you get in?” Habib shouts over the powerful first bars of Beethoven’s last symphony.

  “No, thank you,” Levadski calls out weakly into the swelling emotion of the first movement. He could manage himself, it is only on getting out that he needs assistance.

  “We have time,” he hears Habib.

  Square phrasing, pedantic development and shabby creativity is what Stravinsky accused his dead colleague of in this first movement, Levadski recollects. When he dips one foot and then the other into the bubbles, he discovers the long overdue need to cut his toenails. And Rimsky-Korsakov couldn’t identify the main connecting thread behind the leonine runs. Obviously he didn’t want to, the envious drunkard. Oh no, it was Mussorgsky who was fond of vodka. Where did I read that he always kept a bottle of vodka beneath the table when he was a student at the music academy?

  “Tea?” Habib whispers through the crack in the door.

  “Thank you,” Levadski carefully turns his head in the direction of the door, “would be lovely later.”

  Oh no, the excessive drinker was Glazunov, not Mussorgsky!

  Levadski points his wet forefinger triumphantly at the ceiling.

  “Did you call?” Habib rubs his livery against the bathroom door again.

  “I was only talking out loud,” Levadski says to appease him. Yes, yes, that’s the way it was. It was Glazunov who drank the soul out of his body. And it was in a Shostakovich biography that I read about it. Levadski stretches his left leg out of the water and deposits it on the rim of the bath with a dull thud. That’s how it was. Shosta-kovich, as a boy, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years old, arrived at the Conservatory in St. Petersburg, at the time already called Petrograd. During practice the director of the Conservatory, Glazunov, would sit almost motionless at his desk and mumble barely audible words as soon as the recital faded away, more to himself than to his pupils. Glazunov never got up and approached the musicians or their instruments. What chained him to his desk was a rubber hose. It led from his mouth to below the desk where, in one of the drawers, a bottle of hard liquor was stored.

  “Habib?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Have you ever heard, oh, do come in, I am covered in bubbles. Have you ever heard the saying, Habib, poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master?”

  “The pupil who doesn’t pass his master?” asks Habib, hands behind his back, positioning himself next to the bidet.

  “Surpass, surpass, be greater than the other.”

  Habib shrugs his shoulders.

  “A baby bird learns more than its parents do,” Levadski explains, hiding his leg in the water again. “If the young bird doesn’t become a little better, its parents, from a biological perspective, have lived in vain. Laid eggs and died in vain. You understand, Habib?”

  Habib shrugs his shoulders again.

  “Of course, the child is the death of the parents,” Levadski continues, while attempting to unwrap a piece of soap from its gold-green wrapper. “How do you open this?”

  “Tear it open in the middle,” Habib suggests.

  “Yes, death, a death completely in vain, if this bab
y bird does not surpass its parents by at least half a claw. I would go so far as to claim, poor is the …” The soap makes a bold leap out of its wrapper into the water. “What did I want to say? Oh yes, I would go as far as to claim that before, before … I would claim: Poor is the teacher who is not surpassed by his pupil. And foolish is death without fame.”

  “Well, recognition,” Levadski mumbles, “confirmation, if you like.” He is annoyed, the words don’t sit right, an abyss of countless possible formulations has presented itself just as he wants to complete the sentence.

  What is bad, what is bad …, he continues to formulate in his head, why was it that I called for him anyway, what did I want to say? “Oh!” Levadski gropes around beneath his legs for the soap, “got it! Shostakovich loomed larger for his century than Glazunov. And in spite of this he did not surpass his teacher. You can’t compare apples and pears.”

  “So he never passed him by.”

  “He did pass him by, but didn’t surpass him. Unless Shostakovich drank more than his teacher.” Levadski’s laughter gives way to coughing. “And then I also wanted to ask you to turn the Beethoven up a bit. Without my dentures I think I don’t hear so well.”

  Habib removes himself on tiptoe. He carefully turns the music up. He has such respect for it, Levadski thinks, for it and perhaps for the miracle of technology, the CD player.

  The image of Levadski’s first record player, already dated for its time, appears before his eyes. The record player is warming its dust-covered horn in the sunlight entering through the window of the apartment Levadski has just moved into on Veteran Street No. 82. The shelves have just arrived. Three moving men are sitting on the steps of the stairwell and smoking. A neighbor slowly descends the stairs. The moving men take their cigarettes out of their mouths and step aside. A ghost with gray hair piled up high, a gray skirt, gray jacket, mouse-gray socks and dust-powdered shoes with pencil thin heels clatters past them. Her mouth is painted red, the rouge in the crevices of her cheeks reminiscent of the illustrations of mountain ranges in an atlas of the world.

  “I bow to you, Madame neighbor!” The young Levadski is standing in the doorframe. His threat of falling to his knees before her is met with a smile and topped off with a nod of the head. “She is accustomed to it,” Levadski offers in explanation of his zeal to the moving men, when the neighbor feebly pulls the front door closed several floors down. The movers, who have forgotten to smoke their cigarettes during the laborious descent, throw the burnt-down butts in the tin bucket that Levadski holds out.

  “She mutht be over ninety, why doethn’t she take the elevator?” the mover with the soft-peaked cap says with a lisp.

  “Too proud …” he says, answering the question himself.

  “Don’t tell me she knew Catherine the Great!” the lisping man’s colleague says, unbuttoning his shirt. A sailboat is stranded in the thick of his chest hair.

  “Definitely not Catherine the Great!” Levadski butts in. “If she’s really over ninety, then it is possible she was born during the Crimean War of 1853; that she had her first child during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877; her first grandchild would then have been born during the battles of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, which incurred heavy losses; she will have lost part of her brood in the First World War, and now …” Levadski raises an eyebrow.

  “Go on!” the man with the lisp entreats.

  “And now, the long-lived woman, as if things weren’t bad enough already,” Levadski raises his forefinger, “as if that all wasn’t bad enough, the old lady could now throw the rest of her descendants into the jaws of the Great Patriotic War!”

  “That’th heartbreaking!” The man with the lisp thoughtfully looks down the concrete steps at the door that the eyewitness to history worthy of adoration has just closed behind her.

  “That she has no one, is certain,” Levadski assures them. “After all, the apartments in this block are only being given to war veterans.”

  “That’s why the road is called Veteran Street,” the sailor with the hairy chest happily remarks.

  “Why do you live here? Did you therve at the front?” the man with the lisp wants to know.

  “It depends how you look at it. I was …”

  “You’ve got all your limbs, you’re no veteran!” the sailor growls.

  “Not an invalid or anything,” his colleague with the lisp says, to be more precise.

  “I was …,” Levadski fumbles in his pockets, “I was …”

  “You’re not a veteran!” The voice of the sailor, too thin for his hairy chest, flapping under the cold vaulted ceiling of the stairwell. “Not a veteran or a fighter, either. Where were you?”

  “And where were you, if I may ask?” Levadski says defensively, taking his hands out of his pockets.

  “I couldn’t.” The sailor lights another cigarette.

  The lisping man’s gaze wanders from the sailor to Levadski and from Levadski to the third mover, who hasn’t said a single word so far. “Even our deaf and dumb friend ith lotht for wordth,” says the lisping man, tilting his forehead in the direction of the deaf and dumb man who is stretching his tan and oily bald head up high to sniff the words in the air.

  “He knowth we are talking about him. We – are – not – talking – about – you!”

  “I couldn’t,” the sailor says, defending himself, “because I, err …”

  “What?”

  “Well, why?”

  “Because I had to look after my dovecote.”

  “Errr, hee,” the deaf and dumb man howls, pointing with his nose at the matches that are trickling down onto the steps, from the matchbox the man with the lisp is holding.

  “I hid in the dovecote, I hid there, there you have it!”

  “There you have it, there you have it!” the man with the lisp drones, “the doveth were more preciouth to you than the good old Fatherland! Tho that’th the kind of buddy I have …” The sailor blinks, as if he had a mayfly in his eye. “Don’t tell me that nobody dithcovered you in your hiding plathe!”

  “The hiding place was in a cellar,” the sailor mimes, buttoning up the shirt he has just unbuttoned.

  “Ahha!” the deaf and dumb man gestures dismissively in disgust, “Ahha …”

  “In the thellar,” the man with the lisp repeats.

  “And where were you, my friend?”

  The man with the lisp screws up his lashless eyes before answering. “I have a lithp.”

  Thunder rolls in the sailor’s laugh.

  “I have alwayth had a lithp. I wath unfit for the Fatherland.”

  “Who declared you unfit?” Levadski asks, still standing in the doorframe.

  “That’th a thecret,” says the man with the lisp.

  What kind of thecret, Lewadski nearly lets slip. “What kind of secret?”

  “A big one,” the man with the lisp jokes.

  “Tell us, please!” says the sailor.

  “It wath my father. He himthelf wath a chief offither. That’th the reathon.”

  “Did he die?” The sailor’s eyebrows rise. The man with the lisp starts laughing. “Go on, tell us,” the sailor pleads.

  “I hope tho,” says the man with the lisp, wiping one tear of laughter after the other from the corners of his eyes. “I hope tho.”

  “Ehhe-hee!” the deaf and dumb man says, encouraging him to continue, and rubs himself vigorously on the limestone wall of the stairwell.

  “I hope he ith hiding thomewhere in a dovecot and doethn’t know the war ith over.”

  Levadski points his finger at the watch he is not wearing: the shelves still need to be assembled. “The shelves can wait!” the sailor barks, looking at the lisping man with concern, his head looking like a deflated balloon. “If you please,” he adds more gently. “We are waiting for your story.”

  “I am no veteran.”

  “I thee,” the man with the lisp wakes up.

  “Ehhe-he!” the deaf and dumb man neighs.

  “I was not
at the front, but in exile. In Central Asia.”

  “Wait a minute,” the sailor interrupts, “how did you manage to get your hands on a veteran’s apartment in this street then?”

  “Luck,” Levadski smiles, “pure luck.”

  “That maketh uth even,” the man with the lisp says in conclusion, straightening his softpeaked cap.

  “Ehhe-he,” the deaf and dumb man adds from the limestone wall.

  “He’s a clear case,” the sailor says and throws his cigarette butt into Levadski’s metal bucket. “Unfit because of hearing imp… eh, because he’s deaf.”

  How long ago that was!, Levadski thinks, the bathwater slowly getting cold and the bubbles having disappeared. Nothing is hiding my nakedness. In fact, both of his legs are blowing about like two white flags of surrender at the bottom of the tub. How long ago that was. My beautiful record player, my library yet to be collected. And the neighbor, if she really had been born during the Crimean War, would have been no less than one hundred years old the year that I moved in. It was spring. Or late fall. No, it was spring! Levadski chases away with his arm some remaining wisps of foam. It was March, a time of year filled with hope, when so many women were forced to shed tears, the old ones too. She once came up the stairs with a tear-stained face. With a tear-stained face, and looking disheveled. “Our great leader has died!” she sobbed in the stairwell. If I had not opened my door at the time and seen the old woman’s face twisted into a beaming smile, I would have taken her words as a lament from the heart. “Women are crying on the streets and tearing their hair out: what is to become of us, what is to become of us! Thrown to the dogs!”

  If I had known it was he, thinks Levadski, letting more hot water into the bathtub, the news would have pleased me. That it was he who bundled us two and the whole of Chechnya into cattle cars, Levadski raises his scrawny forefinger, that it was for him that I bent my back like a mule at the edge of the world – Levadski wriggles into a more comfortable position in the bath – in completely hostile terrain, pure derision! If I had known at the time it was he, I would have embraced the witch in the door-frame and shed tears of joy with her. If she really was a hundred years old, then she was a few years older than I am now.