Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

For a lifetime.

  “Something syrupy,” the bartender says, “I am just thinking about what would complement the fruit vodka the gentlemen have already drunk.”

  Sailor, stop dreaming.

  Don’t think of me,

  Sailor, for the unknown

  Already awaits you.

  “Just mix up something for us,” Mr. Witzturn requests.

  “Any old thing isn’t suitable for sophisticated con-sumption!” Levadski remarks in a reproachful voice.

  “Is that so?” Mr. Witzturn menacingly asks the bartender, who nods in agreement.

  “A bartender, however, would never lecture his guests,” Levadski remarks. “After all, a bar has a cultural and social function, hasn’t it?” The bartender agrees with Levadski again. Mr. Witzturn, piqued, rolls his eyes.

  Your home is the ocean,

  Your friends are the stars

  Over Rio and Shanghai,

  Over Bali and Hawaii.

  “Just mix up something for us,” Mr. Witzturn starts in all over again.

  “My God!” Levadski touches his brow. “Any old thing will neither do for us, nor will it do in the eyes of the young man whose care we are in. Get that into your head!”

  “Something syrupy for ladies,” Mr. Witzturn adds.

  “Let the man in charge of the bar have his say. What cocktails have you got anyway?”

  “Would the gentlemen like to know exactly what we have got? We have,” the barman looks at Levadski and the coughing Mr. Witzturn in turn, “a large selection of bases, each embracing a large choice of cocktails. We have,” he pinches his eyes, “aperitifs, classic drinks, low alcohol drinks, non-alcoholic drinks, hot drinks, drinks for hang-overs and corpse-reviving cocktails …”

  Your love is your ship.

  Your yearning is the distance.

  And only to them are you faithful

  For a lifetime.

  “… Martini cocktails, sours, juleps, highballs, flips, fizzes, coladas, to mention a few. Then we have the spirit-based cocktails …”

  “For example?” Mr. Witzturn asks, yawning widely, as if wanting to spit out an entire egg. A similarsized egg slips out of Levadski’s mouth. At the last moment he manages to hide this embarrassment behind a fist.

  “No, we really are interested,” Mr. Witzturn explains, “aren’t we, Mr. Levadski?”

  “Tell us about the spirit bases, please, if you would,” Levadski asks, stifling a second yawn.

  “For example, Campari drinks are mixed with a spirit base, I am sure the gentlemen know that.”

  “Yes, when you go into a café in summer, you frequently see foggedover Campari glasses in the hands of older ladies, don’t you, Mr. Levadski?”

  “I seldom go out, especially when it is very hot.” He should leave off saying ‘don’t you, Mr. Levadski,’ Levadski thinks; if he says it once more, I am going to tell him.

  “Campari and orange was already a classic before our time – Costa Brava, Bella Donna, Bella Musica, Bella Bella.” Mr. Witzturn is gently swaying on his barstool, on and on, even when he can’t think of any more Bellas.

  “And then there are also other Campari drinks,” the bartender cautiously continues, “Cardinal, Rosita, Negroni …”

  “What other cocktails are there on the planet? En-lighten us, young man,” Levadski says, turning to the bartender who, according to the rules of the art, has been polishing a glass the entire time.

  “Vodka drinks, for example, although nowadays they are more often drunk neat,” replies the bartender, dipping a cocktail glass in a basin of water. “Many people drink spirits neat out of reverence for the drink. I too would probably never mix particular spirits. Gin and vodka or gin and whisky. God forbid.”

  “Gin really is something special,” Mr. Witzturn yawns down the length of his flowery tie.

  “A bar without gin,” the bartender comes into his own, “is like an eagle without feathers. You can do anything with it.”

  “Game for anything,” Mr. Witzturn mumbles, letting his chin sink onto his chest.

  “No other spirit has created so many classics,” the barman continues, “Pink Gin, Gin and Tonic, or Martini Dry, would not exist without gin. The more recent hugely popular Alexander’s Sister cocktail wouldn’t either.”

  “What is so special about gin?” Levadski’s chin is also seeking purchase on the lower floors of his upper body.

  “If I were on a desert island,” says the bartender, “and I had to decide on a single alcohol base in order to mix drinks, I would choose gin. Why? Because gin is easy, down-to-earth, discreet, soft. It is self-sufficient. It is self-confident and doesn’t need any external endorsement, that is to say, it needs no other alcohol.”

  “The self is the man,” drones Mr. Witzturn, his chin on his chest like a schnitzel rolling in flour.

  What would you be doing on a desert island as a head bartender? Levadski can’t vouch for whether he said these words or Mr. Witzturn said them. Perhaps, he thinks, I was only thinking out loud. Or I only whispered, very softy whispered … a deserted bar, but why on an island?

  “Never mix gin with vodka, gin with rum, gin with brandy,” he hears the bartender whispering into the glasses.

  “What did you say?”

  “Whisky with liqueurs, gin with juice, vermouth with gin, gin with tequila, juice bitters … A bar without an is-land is like a bar without glasses.” The bartender’s monologue is a sigh, a rustling in the wind.

  The white jacket flutters like a thousand leaves in the wind, thinks Levadski, white poplar …

  “Gin appears to be an ingenious chap,” Mr. Witzturn purrs. Levadski closes one eye. Or maybe he opens it? Inward or outward. This thought does not torment him for long either.

  “Lone Tree for example, very popular with the ladies, gin, dry vermouth, red vermouth, a drop of orange bitters, stirred on ice, served up to the old clapperclaws in a martini glass.”

  “Hahaha,” Mr. Witzturn grunts, to the accompaniment of the sound of his creaking barstool. “Clapper-claws, I will remember that!” Mr. Witzturn learns the new word as he snores. Entire forests are felled with the axe of his nose.

  “Or Flying Dutchman, timeless, simply timeless. Mix gin with an eighth of lime and ice, throw it out the window, done.”

  “Or!” the bartender’s voice is attacking Levadski’s nervous system, “the Merry Widow Number One!”

  “Number One?” Mr. Witzturn asks, taken aback. Levadski puts his hand to his chest. His dentures are still resting in his mouth. Don’t sleep, he commands himself, don’t bat an eyelid.

  “Merry Widow is still a cocktail that many gentlemen like to order for their female company. Dry vermouth, a few squirts of Benedictine and orange bitters, a drop of anisette, gin and a fat lemon, stirred in a mixing beaker and strained into the precooled female countenance. Pure seduction.”

  “I’m for drinking neat,” Mr. Witzturn whispers.

  The bartender clears his throat. Flying Dutchman is what he would recommend for the gentlemen. Not a syrupy drink, but by all means suitable for ladies. Clear and sleek, soaring flight, sharp descent.

  The gentlemen agree.

  “I am extremely interested in your piano teacher. When I try and imagine him, I can almost imagine what it is like to lose one’s mind,” Levadski admits. Mr. Witzturn starts rubbing his eyes again.

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Suddenly it was as if I were you and your piano teacher were giving me a piano lesson, not you. And it was I that had told you all the stories you gave me the pleasure of listening to this evening.”

  “I don’t understand.” Mr. Witzturn loses several invisible eyelashes as he continues rubbing his eyes. “What difference does it make whether you knew my piano teacher or I knew him? He is dead. That’s the only thing that counts.”

  “I hope not,” says Levadski, “I hope not, Mr. Witzturn, we know him, and that should count.”

  “Your cocktails, gentlemen.” Levads
ki is elated.

  “How beautifully you have prepared the Flying Dutchman!”

  “He knew his music,” Mr. Witzturn says and drinks, without looking Levadski in the eye, “my piano teacher.”

  “He still knows his music,” Levadski reassures him after a lengthy pause. “Now he is no longer a medium for you, but you are one yourself.”

  “You are a poet,” Mr. Witzturn tries to joke. The soul of a shy male dog barks out from inside him. “You may very well be right. After all, my piano teacher was a devotee of Scriabin. Do you know Scriabin? Scriabin’s desire was not only to be one with the music, but also for music to merge with all the senses. Do you know Scriabin?”

  Levadski nods. A desire tickles his throat, the desire to bark, softly, very quietly and unobtrusively. Scriabin is dead, too.

  “His idea of absolute music was unique. Scriabin worked on a composition that he programmatically called Mysterium. Here all the arts were to amalgamate into one gigantic Gesamtkunstwerk: music, voice, song, dance, color, scent … The performance of this composition was intended to take place in India and throw everything else into the shadow of what even the most opulent operas had ever been able to offer. Do you understand what it means to be a Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn asks, “to be a devotee of Scriabin? That’s what my piano teacher was.”

  “An unfathomable secret,” Levadski murmurs, attempting to impale an ice cube in his glass with a stirrer.

  “There are at least two things about Scriabin’s music that are entirely unusual,” Mr. Witzturn carries on. “He started out as a kind of Russian Chopin and ended up by taking giant steps, without running or tripping, at the boundaries of tonality.”

  “At the boundaries of tonality,” Levadski repeats, stirring more rapidly in his glass.

  “Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn continues, “never completely said goodbye to Romantic music and a tonal ideal, but broke through many metric, formal and harmonic conventions. This means something, doesn’t it? Conventions!” Mr. Witzturn fumbles with a hand that can’t decide: should it clench itself into a fist or not?

  “My mother,” says Levadski, “my mother was my piano teacher, if I may be permitted to call her that. Women like song and dance.”

  “They are music,” Mr. Witzturn grins into his glass. Levadski smiles embarrassedly through the ice cube he has jammed between two straws.

  “It is only logical that children die after their parents. Everything you think is laughable or unnecessary as a child, you take seriously and consider important in the end – through the magic of death.”

  “Magic?” Mr. Witzturn raises an eyebrow. “Very poetic …”

  “Yes, magic, it throws a ruthless light on things that are intended to and desire to creep into the lives of those left behind,” says Levadski. His straws tremble and the ice cube sinks into the tides of the cocktail. “My mother was my piano teacher,” Levadski says, poking around in the hollow of an ice cube. “Her tinkling bothered me for as long as she lived. Her vacant face hovering over the piano and above all the clouds and her sweating, even that gave me a fright. Now I still can’t watch the musicians in their ecstasy without feeling horror.”

  “Of course, you are confronted with the emptiness that the musicians see. The emptiness makes you scared,” Mr. Witzturn remarks.

  “Exactly, or death that is full of promise. Will you be fulfilled or will you be unfulfilled? My mother seemed to simultaneously decompose, burn, to be reduced to molecules when she was playing music. How could it not be frightening? You know, she sent me on my way with something beautiful, something I took no notice of as a boy. A lesson! Something inside me preserved the moment and put it on a pedestal. This pedestal was to be the resting place of the lesson she secretly imparted to me. Would you like to know what the lesson was?” Woe if he says no, thinks Levadski. He could not offend me more deeply.

  Mr. Witzturn nods.

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “I feel like I have been transported back to my youth when I am with you,” Mr. Witzturn smiles, “when I was so eager to understand women.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “I underestimated bad habits like Yes or no, Do you really love me, How do I look, and so forth in my youthful megalomania. I always wanted to grasp a woman in her entirety. That was fatal.”

  “One last time – yes or no?”

  “Yes, for God’s sake, yes, yes, yes, there is nothing more I long for than to know what the lesson was that your blessed mother taught you!”

  “Once my mother drew a comparison to explain how you played a suspension before a chord at the end of a piano piece.” Mr. Witzturn asks him to speak up a little. “If I think about it now,” Levadski clears his throat, “I can now see that the comparison she drew at the time was to become a metaphor for my little life.” Levadski waits in vain for Mr. Witzturn to ask what kind of comparison it was, coughs and carries on: “The piece I was playing was nearing the end, the finish was a soft melancholy minor, but I just wanted to be done and so I played it with equal impatience, something my mother was not at all happy about. Look, she said, up there on the mountain there is a mighty gate in front of a beautiful castle. You are a messenger, riding towards that gate. From a great distance you can hear the old wooden gate snapping shut into its lock. That is the way you are meant to play the suspension.”

  “To your mother!” Mr. Witzturn raises his glass, bows his head and fortunately only stabs his cheek with his straw. “Only I don’t see what the lesson to be learned consists of.”

  “In the metaphor, Mr. Witzturn, in the metaphor.”

  “In the metaphor for what? And what does it have to do with your life? A beautiful castle, a gate snapping shut?”

  “My little life,” Levadski mumbles, “yes, my life, perhaps she wanted to make me the gift of a metaphor, as a greeting, as a dowry for my future, and I, I don’t know what …”

  A soft neighing can be heard coming from Mr. Witzturn’s chest. His mouth is closed, the corners are pointing at the peanuts that have missed his mouth and are now mostly lying on the floor, crushed. By the light of the candles they look like the bone splinters of tiny skulls.

  “Down there,” Levadski points to the peanuts, “down there, there are little people. It is grotesque, almost perverse, to deny the existence of gnomes. Fairy tales do not lie. They exist. Down there!”

  “Come off it,” Mr. Witzturn neighs.

  “Don’t you notice something?”

  “Oh, what!”

  “That we are shooting upwards in our chairs? And the earth has after all turned out to be a disc.”

  “I will have another Cosmonaut Cocktail.” Levadski clutches his head. A woman’s round face with a crimson pout is sitting on Mr. Witzturn’s chair.

  “Here I am!”

  “Oh, there you are,” Levadski breathes with a sigh of relief, “for a moment I lost my bearings and thought you were the young woman who sat down beside me.”

  “The castle in the distance, the mighty gate, the lock snapping shut, the castle, the gate …,” Mr. Witzturn repeats expectantly.

  “Well,” Levadski scratches his head. “The metaphor of the castle … hm. I knew it a moment ago. How exasperating,” he moans, “a moment ago I knew it, and now, now that I want to talk about it, it has escaped me.”

  “Fine, another time then,” Mr. Witzturn sighs.

  “I’ve got it!”

  “Yes?”

  “Hhm. A moment ago I had it.”

  “Should I perhaps explain to you how I see it with the castle and the gate in your life?” Levadski has no objection. Mr. Witzturn blinks a few times and begins to talk.

  “Don’t be offended, but in my eyes the metaphor of the closing gate seems quite trivial.”

  “What do you see?” A glob of saliva gets stuck in Levadski’s windpipe. He grips fast to the bar while coughing.

  “The image of the mighty gate falling shut …” Mr. Witzturn is chewing on his lower lip, “it could be death your
blessed mother wanted to prepare you for.” Levadski’s eyes light up. “And that as a human being you should not be too surprised if you find yourself standing in front of this mighty gate one day.” Levadski’s cheeks are on fire. “If it was not a lesson, it was definitely a sign, a sign to raise the spirits. From one person to another. Now you have heard it from a stranger. The way you wanted to.” Levadski’s chin nods and drops to his chest like a wilted leaf on a snow-covered pond. Beneath his shirt, spring arrives. “You know everything yourself …”

  “A Cosmonaut Cocktail for the lady.”

  “How pretty, it even has a sugared lemon slice … A ring of Saturn!” The white face is enchanted.

  “A foreigner,” in Mr. Witzturn’s opinion.

  “Like all of us,” whispers Levadski.

  “I am writing a book about an old man,” the young lady with the Cosmonaut Cocktail tells the bartender. “A lonely old man returns to the city of his childhood in order to die there, so that the circle is complete.”

  “That sounds like a fascinating story,” the bartender says with a frosty expression.

  “Here, in this bar,” says the pale female cosmonaut, “my hero squanders his wealth, everything he has. That’s why I need to try all the cocktails an aged gentleman would order. For example, cocktails that were popular in his youth.”

  “Allow me to make a remark,” the bartender says. “An older gentleman would more likely sit at a table over there by the window or very close to the piano. The bar would not be the place for him.”

  “A foreigner,” Levadski hears Mr. Witzturn mumble. “And still no electricity.” Whether I keep my eyes open or closed is really beside the point, thinks Levadski, I am fine. I am fine. Fine …

  “It depends on how old the hero of your novel is. For example, a Cosmonaut Cocktail like that would have been popular in the sixties.” The bartender appears to be speaking out of a Millésimé champagne bottle.

  “I presume,” says the young lady, sounding out of a Finlandia bottle, “that my fellow compatriot Gagarin made a contribution towards the naming of the cocktail.”

  “The first man in space,” echoes from the bartender’s secret glass cubbyhole.