Who Is Martha?

by Marjana Gaponenko

  “She is from the Soviet Union,” Mr. Witzturn growls into Levadski’s ear, making his lids flutter.

  “I don’t know,” the Russian says, “whether he really was the first man in space.”

  The Soviet Union doesn’t exist anymore, Levadski wants to say to Mr. Witzturn, but to do so he would have to open his eyes. Or his mouth. The bartender’s laughter sounds like an explosion of sparkling bubbles.

  “But there was nobody out there before your fellow countryman.” Levadski imagines one of the bartender’s eyes swimming up the neck of the bottle.

  “I don’t know,” the female cosmonaut repeats stubbornly, “whether Gagarin was the first man in space. Perhaps there were other creatures there long before him. For example, after they decided to leave our planet for particular reasons.”

  “For what reasons?” the bartender wants to know.

  “To give the apes a chance, I would say.”

  “Clever, very clever,” the bartender is amused, “perhaps these apes were meant to follow the example of the first true cosmonauts and give the animals a chance?”

  “I plead for the horses,” says the Russian. Before we all fly to Mars, we should put the horses in the right light.” The bartender finds dogs more exciting. May dogs rule!

  “Most of them are overbred,” the Russian objects, “and besides, dogs are half human. Too spoiled. Wolves would be better, because,” the Russian deliberates, “they are the apes of the dog world.”

  “May the wolves populate our cities,” the bartender cheers, “drive our cars! May …”

  “A clear-thinking wolf would keep its paws off our civilization,” Mr. Witzturn interrupts. The bartender places his hand on the shaker. It immediately fogs up, and he remains in that position, sucking in his lips. A veil of perfume wafts into Levadski’s face.

  “A dense forest with ivy, ferns and mosses, of course,” the Russian replies, “that would be a wolf civilization.” Mr. Witzturn laughs.

  “The forests are dying! I am afraid your wolf will have to learn to drive our cars.”

  “It will not do so under duress,” the Russian counters, “it will carry out its business on the arid land until a magnificent forest carpets over it, even if it has to give its life in return!”

  A true poet, thinks Levadski.

  “Gimlet, Hot Toddy, Americano, Mai Thai,” the bartender hisses, as if he were enflamed in wild hatred against the cocktails. “Bourbon Highball, Harvey Wallbanger, Sours, White and Black Russian, to summarize. Very popular in the sixties: Pimm’s Cocktail, Screwdriver, Mojito, Milk Punch, Vodka was newly discovered. To have a bar at home also became fashionable at that time.”

  “I remember,” Mr. Witzturn croaks, “the stiff cocktail parties where I stood until I was ready to drop and religiously kissed housewives’ moisturized hands. Hungry and dazed, I bit into their sausage fingers and scratched my mouth on their precious stone rings. There was nothing to eat, just masses of cocktails mixed by the gentleman of the house. That’s the way we created the foundation for our own conservation, isn’t that so Mr., er …” Levadski smiles at Mr. Witzturn through closed eyes. “I was never a party animal, Mr., er …”

  “I suggest we drink a cocktail from our youth. Maestro!” Mr. Witzturn says in a weak voice. “What did they drink during the war?”

  “In wartime there was no time for sophisticated drinking,” Levadski interjects.

  “Then let’s drink something from the sixties.” The bartender recommends Cuba Libre. Lime, white rum, Coke and a Caribbean zest for life.

  “I’ll pass,” says Mr. Witzturn, twiddling a bent straw between his fingers, “to me Cuba Libre sounds like a disrespectful belittlement of revolutionary ideals.”

  “But my dear Mr. Witzturn, the time of revolutions is over. At least it is for us.”

  “Once more you are mistaken, dear Mr. Levadski. Nobody should underestimate revolution’s contribution to the improvement of the decline of the world, nor should we. We are …”

  Mr. Witzturn scratches his temple as if in so doing new ideas could trickle out. “There is no doubt that we are on the verge of a new revolution.”

  “Strange,” Levadski shrugs his shoulders, “I am not sensing anything of this revolution.”

  “Not surprising,” Mr. Witzturn laughs hoarsely. “It is a subtle revolution, one the people really need.”

  “Which people?”

  “In the first instance, our occidental people. Oh,” Mr. Witzturn purses his lips in pleasure, “a Romantic age is dawning, the time of the Neoromantics, an age that will make the Enlightenment and the embarrassing turbulence of the last century seem like a bundle of dried forest mushrooms.”

  “Fantastic.” Levadski folds his hands as if he were about to say a prayer at table.

  “The revolution is creeping on,” Mr. Witzturn adds solemnly. “We will have to dress warmly for it.”

  “Is there a different cocktail with Caribbean zest for life?” Levadski asks. Piña Colada occurs to the barman. Juice of a ripe pineapple, ice, sugar, coconut cream, lime juice and Bacardi rum.

  “Something for women and children,” Levadski says, “and for real men.”

  “We will take it,” Mr. Witzturn says, “Piña Colada cheers everyone up and paradoxically has a depressing effect on cheerful dispositions. In the sixties, Piña Colada was the magic potion for young widows.” Mr. Witzturn’s nose, like a wooden arrow in the wind, turns in the direction of the Russian. “They had barely overcome their grief, barely felt the stirrings of a joie de vivre, when after having overindulged in drink, out of the blue, they jumped off railway bridges. Some ran right out of their local bar, singleminded, straight to the river, without having paid their bills.”

  “I understand little of women,” Levadski whispers to Mr. Witzturn, who promptly turns towards the whiteskinned foreigner again.

  “The cocktails are not that important for the novel.” The Russian’s words sound muted, as if she were holding a folded handkerchief in front of her mouth. “More important are, perhaps, the conversations at the bar that my hero thinks he is engaging in. The probability is very high, I fear, that there is nobody for this ripe old man to have a conversation with. I personally would like my hero not to be on his own. But it would be too simple,” she sighs into the bartender’s back, who is stretching to reach a bottle of Balvenie. “Too simple and too sad.”

  “Too sad if he had a drinking companion?” The bartender turns to face her; the bottle of Balvenie turns out to be a half empty bottle of port.

  “Everyone dies in their own way,” the Russian smiles, licking the sugared rim of her cocktail glass. A crack, long and thin like a luminous root, snakes up the length of the glass, into which the mouth and the Russian’s shock of hair have already disappeared. The rest of her body appears to disintegrate into specks of dust in the darkness and never to have existed.

  With a creaking sound, Levadski turns his head to-wards Mr. Witzturn, who is in the middle of discreetly adjusting his nose. “What I don’t understand is why we have to dress warmly for the Neo-Neoromantic age.” Mr. Witzturn grins.

  “Because it will exercise a painful but also a salutary blow to reigning reason. The occidental civilization, you will agree with me, is ruthlessly being roasted in the sun of naked facts. The tree of belief has withered away in our materialist world – it no longer offers shade. To survive, man will remember Romanticism and have to seek it in other spheres. He will seek it beneath the roots of trees and in groundwater. He will seek and find, and in this way return to nature. That is what my reason tells me, Mr. Levadski.”

  “Oh, reason,” Levadski juts out his lower lip. “I often think to myself that if genuine terror exists, then it is the terror of reason. It is reason that doesn’t allow the most beautiful fruits of the imagination to mature …”

  “My sentiments entirely,” says Mr. Witzturn, “my sentiments entirely, dear friend, to hell with reason.” He wants to add something, scratches his head and then chang
es his mind. “We have light!” The bartender’s voice sounds more cheerful than it is.

  What a shame, thinks Levadski, just when I really feel like I am thinking more clearly.

  “We have light,” the bartender says triumphantly. With a wet thumb and forefinger he approaches the round brackets holding the candles and puts out one after the other. In the mirror, Levadski sees that the white dinner jacket belongs to a man no longer youthful in appearance, but with attentive and infinitely weary eyes. We have light, the bartender seems to whisper to himself. Light …

  5

  Zimmer / Room 501–521

  “PHARAOH EAGLE-OWL, PARASITIC JAEGER, ORANGE-BAND-ed snapper tyrant, Costa’s Hummingbird … Well, these aren’t special birds, it’s only their names that make them special, lend them a certain tone, dignity and maybe gravitas. But what’s in a name? Everything, and already blown away by the wind, scattered to the wind like sand.”

  “You are sad because your friend has left?”

  “Happy and at the same time sad. I met a special person, Habib, a person like every other and yet special to me, because I met him, consciously met him. That I did it consciously was of course not obvious to me. It is only now that I am conscious of it. I don’t know whether you understand me.”

  Habib gives his round head a good scratch. “Yes, we often forget that every person we meet could become a special person. For us.”

  “And through us, or is that asking too much?”

  “Yes, maybe that too,” Habib nods. “It was only when I was looking after my paralyzed father, as fate would have it, that I really met him, even though for years he raised me, saw me naked, disciplined me. Our real encounter happened when he lay helpless before me and I learned to hold back my tears while feeding him and changing him. It often felt like he knew about this battle within me and he too held back his tears, other tears, tears of pride and joy that would have been completely out of place.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he should have been embarrassed or grit his teeth in anger. After all, I was his son, doing women’s work. But he was proud nevertheless, I am sure of that.”

  “Perhaps your father became a real father through his pride and his joy, a better person.”

  “A son who does women’s work!” Habib laughs. “Evidently he had to suffer a stroke in order to grasp that it wasn’t something dishonorable.”

  “You see, I feel like that today, I am sad and yet I feel happy. I will never see this gentleman again. And perhaps I will forget him soon. But it won’t mean anything, the genuine remains nameless, incoherent and as reliable as a Swiss watchmaker’s clock.”

  “It’s still early, I bet your friend is at the breakfast table and doesn’t dare hide behind the morning paper out of fear that he will miss you.”

  “In his place I wouldn’t come to breakfast. Why cloud the memory of yesterday with so much daylight. Everything that wanted to be said was said. Or so I assume, even though there’s much I can’t remember anymore.”

  “I am happy to go and see whether your friend is at the breakfast table. Or can I pass on a letter from you to him. A card.”

  “You are kind, Habib.”

  Black spider webs burgeon in Habib’s nostrils, a tiny insect intermittently twitches in one of them. If he were to sneeze, the little thing would fly out of his nose and trace a high arc, Levadski thinks. He wants to say something nice to the butler but he remains silently slumped in his armchair. Habib, hands folded, appears to be waiting for something.

  “I am an old man,” Levadski interrupts the silence. His voice sounds muted, as if the walls of the room were thickly carpeted and not fitted with silk wallpaper. “I am an old man,” he repeats firmly, “I will die soon.” A laughing matter too, thinks Levadski. “I will die,” he says once more. Habib’s chin sinks to his chest, as if he wants to sleep.

  “I am not in this hotel for fun,” Levadski continues, “I don’t want you to form the wrong impression of me.” Habib’s eyes are two fresh graves covered in hoarfrost.

  “I came back to the city of my childhood. Not even childhood. I returned to the city of my blessed mother. In order to die, so I thought. But I don’t think the money will suffice for that. My God, have I grown so tough, too tough for death?” Habib looks like he is fast asleep. A fly is circling on an invisible turntable above him.

  “Even the fact that I deceived my old apartment and became a traitor, an adulterer, is no longer painful. That is how tough I have become. I swapped it for a luxurious lover, for this suite, for grandeur and the strangely delightful view – over there the pharmacy, a kiosk, a taxi stand, the streetcar tracks, hooded crows’ nests. With the stroke of a pen I eliminated all those shared years with my apartment. But it is not painful anymore, there is something else that is painful. The joy.” Habib nods, his head rolls to one side, his tongue, a little red flag, is peeking out of his mouth.

  “I did everything, everything wrong, you can’t just suddenly die like I was intending to. I am not in pain. Yet, what should I do, what should I do Habib, I have to die, I have to give up the ghost somehow.” A young, almost transparent eel snakes out of Habib’s mouth. The butler sighs deeply in his sleep.

  “I wish I could call my family doctor now and tell him, It is all wrong, I don’t have any complaints, I can’t for the life of me die, Professor Doctor, but his number is in my notebook, which is lying beside my telephone. It is an old fashioned model, I don’t know whether you would even know the type. The telephone is gathering dust in my apartment, which I swapped for this suite here. For death in luxury. Where Death is, I would like to know. In the city by the sea, on a park bench, where I was in the habit of sitting for hours on end until I grew cold. Maybe Death is sitting there and spitting on its scythe. Is sitting and spitting its hissing saliva … Even if I call my family doctor and report on my completely inappropriate condition, what use is it to me? I wouldn’t feel any worse. Of course I could accuse him of having made me the false promise of death, but what would I gain? That I decided to celebrate my infirmity and my approaching end in luxury is my problem. That I can’t just insist on languishing and dying is also my problem. What fault is it of the doctor’s that I can’t go back? That I can’t stay here either? The money will suffice for a few more weeks. And then?” In Habib’s deep silence the wind is playing with the well bucket. A mouse is gnawing at the rope.

  “My apartment is locked. Dust clings to the books of my library, and the little radio, and to Radio World Harmony. Dust and ash from the bridges that are burning. My good old apartment. There is no going back anymore, Habib. I feel fine, the end is not in sight. Do you understand what that means?” In Habib’s silence, cannons are being stuffed with gunpowder, a crow flies over a sundrenched plain, a messenger between two enemy camps. It is fall.

  “Not so long ago I stepped into the golden elevator of the hotel. It was a delight to hover in the elevator. I felt like I was in my mother’s lap, beyond good and evil. A possibility occurred to me then. I imagined dying a more pleasant death than the one prescribed me by my illness. A beautiful, horrific death, unworthy of a scientist. A magical disappearance. I imagined riding up to the last floor and looking out the window into an empty crow’s nest. In that instant I am dead.” Habib’s eyelids twitch in his sleep. He is running for his life.

  “I never looked in empty bird’s nests, Habib. From the moment I started admiring birds I always knew: I can do what I like, I can observe birds through a telescope, I can sketch them, count them, play to them on a whistle, I can roast them and eat them, make handles for my desk drawers from their bare bones – I could do everything. But if one day I should look through the bare twigs of trees into an empty nest, I would be done for.” A sleepy smile blossoms on Habib’s face. Levadski places his hand on his heart.

  “A forbidden fruit that means more than death. The look into an empty bird’s nest obliterates everything: my curiosity for life would have been erased, my joie de vivre, my respect for a
miracle of creation – the bird. Looking into a friend’s chamber pot is nothing by comparison. Then I looked around in the elevator and scrutinized my four mirror-images, they all panted down my neck and said: Let it be, my friend, go and enjoy breakfast instead, until you can no longer get up. Wander from window to window in your suite, watch the bustle in the street, the old ladies with their comical lapdogs, after all it makes you happy, doesn’t it? I glanced up at the mirrored ceiling of the elevator. Ride up to the fifth floor, my fifth double whispered to me, look into a bird’s nest, give yourself the last blow, rob yourself of joy, die!” Habib’s mouth twitches, as if he has bitten into an electric cable.

  “I suspect that my dear departed father looked into an empty bird’s nest before taking his life in the forest. Out of boredom. He was a dreamer, but who knows who he really was? Perhaps, and that would be far worse, he planned and carried it out consciously because he foresaw the future, the war, the revolution, hunger. The most pleasant conception is that there was no bullet, just a look – a blue titmouse whirs past my father’s breaking eye, to a distant and unreachable branch … While I was hovering in the elevator on the way to breakfast, I understood my father, whom I never knew. For a split second I felt a deep sense of understanding within me. That’s how it is, Habib.” Levadski wipes his mouth and carries on talking.

  “What I am left with, in my situation, is hope in the power of thought. There is, after all, an internal alarm clock. I often used to get up by telling myself before going to sleep, Tomorrow at seven on the dot. And at seven o’clock on the dot I would leap out of bed as if I had been stung by bees. Do you know that internal alarm clock?” In Habib’s silence, flags flutter, spurs jangle, clumps of grass are whirled about by horse hooves, slowly, like corals overgrown with seaweed.

  “All I can do is wind that internal clock up again and rely on it: drop dead in two weeks. What do you say to that?” Black smoke pours from Habib’s mouth, a barn full of pigs and piglets is burning. It is wartime. Wartime or just a storm.