“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 baby 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.”