“Who declared you unfit?” Levadski asks, still standing in the doorframe.
“That’th a thecret,” says the man with the lisp.
What kind of thecret, Lewadski nearly lets slip. “What kind of secret?”
“A big one,” the man with the lisp jokes.
“Tell us, please!” says the sailor.
“It wath my father. He himthelf wath a chief offither. That’th the reathon.”
“Did he die?” The sailor’s eyebrows rise. The man with the lisp starts laughing. “Go on, tell us,” the sailor pleads.
“I hope tho,” says the man with the lisp, wiping one tear of laughter after the other from the corners of his eyes. “I hope tho.”
“Ehhe-hee!” the deaf and dumb man says, encouraging him to continue, and rubs himself vigorously on the limestone wall of the stairwell.
“I hope he ith hiding thomewhere in a dovecot and doethn’t know the war ith over.”
Levadski points his finger at the watch he is not wearing: the shelves still need to be assembled. “The shelves can wait!” the sailor barks, looking at the lisping man with concern, his head looking like a deflated balloon. “If you please,” he adds more gently. “We are waiting for your story.”
“I am no veteran.”
“I thee,” the man with the lisp wakes up.
“Ehhe-he!” the deaf and dumb man neighs.
“I was not at the front, but in exile. In Central Asia.”
“Wait a minute,” the sailor interrupts, “how did you manage to get your hands on a veteran’s apartment in this street then?”
“Luck,” Levadski smiles, “pure luck.”
“That maketh uth even,” the man with the lisp says in conclusion, straightening his softpeaked cap.
“Ehhe-he,” the deaf and dumb man adds from the limestone wall.
“He’s a clear case,” the sailor says and throws his cigarette butt into Levadski’s metal bucket. “Unfit because of hearing imp… eh, because he’s deaf.”
How long ago that was! Levadski thinks, the bathwater slowly getting cold and the bubbles having disappeared. Nothing is hiding my nakedness. In fact, both of his legs are blowing about like two white flags of surrender at the bottom of the tub. How long ago that was. My beautiful record player, my library yet to be collected. And the neighbor, if she really had been born during the Crimean War, would have been no less than one hundred years old the year that I moved in. It was spring. Or late fall. No, it was spring! Levadski chases away with his arm some remaining wisps of foam. It was March, a time of year filled with hope, when so many women were forced to shed tears, the old ones too. She once came up the stairs with a tear-stained face. With a tear-stained face, and looking disheveled. “Our great leader has died!” she sobbed in the stairwell. If I had not opened my door at the time and seen the old woman’s face twisted into a beaming smile, I would have taken her words as a lament from the heart. “Women are crying on the streets and tearing their hair out: what is to become of us, what is to become of us! Thrown to the dogs!”
If I had known it was he, thinks Levadski, letting more hot water into the bathtub, the news would have pleased me. That it was he who bundled us two and the whole of Chechnya into cattle cars, Levadski raises his scrawny forefinger, that it was for him that I bent my back like a mule at the edge of the world — Levadski wriggles into a more comfortable position in the bath — in completely hostile terrain, pure derision! If I had known at the time it was he, I would have embraced the witch in the door-frame and shed tears of joy with her. If she really was a hundred years old, then she was a few years older than I am now.
“Would you like your dentures?” Habib whispers through the slit in the door. In the background the second movement of the Ninth is budding, bees with bodies of metal plate, loaded with pollen of fine iron dust, smashed to pieces on the buds that turn into the flowers of a thorny violin shrub.
“Thank you, I bathe without my dentures.”
Habib leaves. Levadski falls asleep. He falls asleep and wakes up as an organ grinder. It is winter. Large snow-flakes are hovering around the street lamps and bare branches, a snowflake chases a matron’s behind. There is a hum in the air. His hat in front of him on the ground, Levadski starts to grind his organ. A few snowflakes hover around the emptiness in his hat. Levadski carries on grinding — the day has just begun. Soon some change is thrown into his hat. He carries on grinding, gives a nod of thanks for the coins thrown to him by strangers. The lady with the enormous behind is also a welcome sight, her beauty spot compensated for by her head, so like a bird’s. A parakeet. How charming, Levadski is pleased, and how practicaclass="underline" arms for grasping, a beak for pecking. A bee-eating couple walks past him, colorful like all coraciiformes. If they were not so lovable I would be compelled to compare them to gypsies, thinks Levadski. The woman promptly turns around and, on the attack, spits a curse at him: Eat and be eaten! Shove off, Levadski says to the wicked woman in his mind. Darling, what’s keeping you? her husband, who is standing a little to one side, asks in a guttural display of courtship. Brup-brup-brup, I am coming! the female calls to him. Brhxssrrhhhr! she hurls in the direction of Levadski. No understand, he retorts unmoved. You racist dog! the bee-eater hisses and turns back to her husband. Levadski carries on grinding his organ, he cranks and cranks, and then he sees that his organ is a cat he’s pulling by the tail. He carries on cranking, for he wants to earn money, after all. He tries to play Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier on the cat, and immediately the cat turns into his mother’s meatgrinder. But Levadski won’t be misled. He cranks and cranks. He cranks until the meatgrinder turns into a coffin, beneath the glass lid of which he recognizes his mother’s features. And still, he carries on cranking. He plays his song until he collapses.
When Habib helps him out of the cold water, Levadski is ashamed of the joy he feels at the thought of having caught a cold or even pneumonia. It would be simple if he could outsmart the cancer like that. Without any ado, without a battle. Like a lethargic woman, like an Ophelia, Levadski feels like a corpse floating in the water, when Habib, turning a blind eye, holds an outstretched bath towel before him.
“You know, Habib, there is everything in nature, murder, premeditated and otherwise, hunger and plenty, yet more murder of all stripes. The only thing that doesn’t exist is prejudice. I have just been thinking,” Levadski slips into the bathrobe, “that human thought has produced nothing more unnatural than prejudice.” Habib smiles out of the corner of his mouth. “I mean, of what good is it to the human species? Does it get us anywhere? No.” Habib nods. “Is there any sense in which it is a precautionary measure for survival? No, for we know the truth in our hearts.” Habib nods twice. “Prejudices don’t even have an evolutionary selective meaning. So where do they stem from?” Habib shrugs his shoulders. Levadski raps a finger on his skull. “From a sick brain, my friend. What do you think of gypsies?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you, Habib!”
“In a course I attended for hotel personnel on etiquette, how kind of you to mention it, it was recently explained to us that you can’t call gypsies ‘gypsies’ anymore. They are ‘travelers.’”
“How silly …” The bathrobe is too big or Levadski too scrawny. “How heavy the bathrobe is,” he says to Habib. Habib guides Levadski to one of the armchairs.
“Travelers or Sinti and Roma,” the butler adds with a concerned expression.
“Not everything at once, at least,” Levadski wheezes and takes a seat. “Who came up with the idea?”
“The Minister of Culture?” Habib suggests, liberating himself from Levadski’s damp claws. Levadski shakes his head.