Mollified by the tender Iberico, Levadski grants everyone their happiness. Over coffee his gaze travels from the ladies’ table to the bustling waiters, to the intently chewing restaurant guests, to the slender glass vases filled with anthuriums that remind him of polished water lily leaves with a jutting large-pored phallus. Levadski closes one eye.
“A nice man, but the way he treats her, it’s atrocious,” the friends warble. “Today this, tomorrow that, money for everything, but she had to clean the house herself when she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy … Perhaps her obsession with shopping … What could she possibly need, she has money … Something nice to wear, makeup, the things you need as a young woman … But in an advanced stage of pregnancy, please. You just want your peace and quiet. Atrocious, I’m telling you, her husband … The crust is the best … The salt crust is melting … On your blouse, darling …”
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.