Levadski frowned. North Caucasus. Nothing came to mind apart from the fact that the Caucasian goldcrest was to be found there 6,500 feet above sea level, and that it was said to be lighter than the Central European goldcrest. An elegant bird with orange colored head feathers it would impressively raise when rankled.
“Sisisisisisi …,” Levadski sang gently, as if to entice the bird from the scent of the onion tart.
“Sisisi-sia!” his mother chimed in. “Everything will turn out fine,” she said, placing her hand on Levadski’s shoulder.
Everything would be fine, is what Levadski wanted to say and burst into tears. But he didn’t move. He felt like a pillar in the ruins of a palace, a pillar on which a goldcrest sits, striking up a song.
“The Caucasian goldcrest is all you can think of? God in Heaven, what have you been doing at university in Lemberg?” Levadski’s mother got up from the chair. From below, she looked like she had silently and secretly died during Levadski’s absence. Levadski also rose and went to the window. His mother turned towards him. What a relief! From this angle she looked like an old woman, a faded beauty, blossoming decay, a firm figure of resolution.
“The rednecked goose, my son. Branta ruficollis. The favorite dish of the Caucasus. Did you not come across it in your studies?”
“We mainly explored the birds of Europe.”
“Dear child. Don’t you have any world maps, eyes in your head? Chechnya is in the North Caucasus and therefore in Europe. Wake up!”
“Who says so?” Levadski laughed.
“I do, and so does science.”
“What science?” Levadski shook with laughter. Tears rolled down his face. Or were they beads of sweat?
“Don’t cry,” said Levadski’s mother. Levadski made a dismissive gesture and howled. “Cartography, geography and human intelligence tell us so, my son,” she went on. “The Caucasus lies on the edge of Europe, and with that, Elbrus is our highest mountain.”
The northern red-necked goose, the most colorful and beautiful of all the sea geese, really had flown past Levadski the student without making a noise. How could he live, learn, drink honey vodka, without knowing that the red-neck goose existed, that it bred in the tundra of West Siberia and wintered on the southwest coast of the Caspian Sea? It was a mystery to him.
“Is it really such a magnificent bird, the northern rednecked goose?” Levadski asked with a tear-stained face.
“Yes,” said his mother and handed him her handkerchief embroidered with calyces set in squares.
“If they arrive in great droves at the Caspian Sea, you can definitely conclude there is a bitterly cold winter further in the north. The geese live according to a strict daily routine in their winter habitat: before sunrise they take off for the grazing land. The main swarm with thousands of birds sets out last. When the sun goes down, the return flight to their overnight stay begins.” Levadski let the tears flow. “You must follow me,” Levadski’s mother said and shrugged her shoulders. “I am going!” she said a little louder and raised her eyebrows, throwing her forehead into a myriad of unflattering lines.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because it must be so.”
“What must be so? You must manipulate me, exploit my love for you and throw my studies to the wind? After all, you paid for them, mother!”
“That’s beside the point. When my child’s life is at stake, I am unwavering. You are coming with me, and if you are not, then I will go and die far away from you in an ignominious manner. And nobody will commit my body to the earth.”
“This is blackmail, madness!” said Levadski stamping his foot.
“So it is,” Levadski’s mother said, “I am going now.”
VI
LEVADSKI WENT WITH HIS MOTHER. FROM A FLY-INFESTED train station in southern Russia, he wired his institute in Lemberg. DETAINED STOP MOTHER ILL STOP PERMISSION FOR TIME OFF STOP
From time to time he felt a faint glimmer of hope that his mother would turn back as soon as she saw the snow-covered peaks of Mount Kazbek and drank from the pure springs, and that he would be able to continue dedicating his time to his birds and his studies, and the letter and all talk of an imminent Flood would simply be a bad dream. Levadski’s mother caught sight of Mount Kazbek’s peak, drank from pure springs, and did not turn back. Not in her dreams did she think of turning her back on the mountains.
They stayed the night in guesthouses with ceilings that grew lower and lower; fleas ransacked their beds. Swallow nests, at which a landlord proudly pointed a dirty finger, hung like old hamburgers from the beams of the house. When Levadski and Levadski’s mother more frequently came across shepherds by the wayside leaning on their staffs and wearing tall fur hats, Levadski knew: there was no going back.
In a Chechen mountain village almost seven thousand feet above sea level, Levadski became a shepherd. His mother became the wife of the village elder and the ornament of the village, an honor she owed to her pale skin, the result of an iron deficiency. From his stepfather, Levadski received a tall sheep’s wool hat that covered half his face. He wore it and looked like the other eyeless men everywhere nodding off, leaning on their staffs. Slowly Levadski embraced the hat. He believed he could think clearly beneath it. The tall fur hat wasn’t completely absurd. During the day it protected Levadski’s head from the heat, in the evening from the cold. Here, too, the dear Lord breathed purpose into all things that men were given to create.
After a year as a shepherd, when Levadski toyed with the idea of leaving his mother and resuming his studies, German soldiers marched into Poland. The Flood drowned the land. It drowned Lemberg. It drowned Stanislau, Tarnopol, Brody, forests and marshes, it licked the claws of the startled birds and sent its fetid breath to the stars. The stars said to hell with the Flood, just as they had always said to hell with the Flood. This in itself was a consolation. The ornithological institute in Lemberg was bound to be closed, Levadski thought, I can in all likelihood once again forget about banding the birds this year.
The Flood spread further to the east. “They won’t get this far,” Levadski’s mother said. She was right. The Germans were stopped at Mozdok in North Ossetia and never reached Chechnya. This, however, did not prevent the Russians from cramming all the Chechens into trains and deporting them to Central Asia as traitors and collaborators with the German army.
Perhaps it was owing to Levadski’s mother’s dazzlingly white skin and Levadski’s height (he was two heads taller than the other Chechen shepherds) that the two enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to work in a kolkhoz. Levadski’s mother milked cows from dawn till dusk and mourned for her second husband, who had died on the deportation train. Levadski worked his way up from load hauler to first secretary of the kolkhoz.
Years later, everything that had legs was on the move: the Chechens went back to Chechnya, Levadski and his mother went back to the village that was now part of Ukraine. When they stepped off the train his mother suddenly stood still and gripped Levadski by the sleeve, as if she had choked on a word. Then they continued on their way.
They strode towards the village like lovers, over furrowed and frozen fields. Levadski saw the village houses leaning against each other like old acquaintances, embarrassed, as if they had been spattered with excrement. None of them had stirred from their place. The forester’s house had shaken off its roof in the years of separation and filled with bitterness, and perhaps out of defiance, too, it had spit out all its doors and window frames. Blind and shattered, it crouched there beneath an open sky.
“The birdbath is missing,” Levadski’s mother declared and burst into tears. The count’s birdbath, a present made by the old nobleman on the occasion of Levadski’s birth, was gone. Levadski knew that it had arrived wrapped in gold paper and tied with a velvet bow, a present as fateful as a split second in which one looks into another’s eyes before diving into a fatal passion. There was no trace of the birdbath anymore, and for a fleeting moment Levadski felt as if he had never been born, as if he had spent these years as a wandering bubble, imagining that it had all been a dream in his head. When they turned around and went back to the railway station, the strange feeling had left him.