“So what if I was never capable of love?” Levadski asked the back of a slim volume with the tight gold lettering Manual for the Domestication of Extremely Reluctant Parrots. “At least I was capable of being proud, I was proud of you, little book. Just as love allegedly pulls the rug out from under lovers’ feet, my pride pulled the rug out from under my feet. I didn’t soar high or for long, so I didn’t land on my beak, but softly and in my element — in my library. I was never disappointed …”
Levadski would have liked to cry, but he suspected that these tears would have been on account of the doctor’s phone call rather than the solemnity of the moment, and so forbade himself to. My decorum will be the death of me, thought Levadski, for even the most natural thing suddenly seemed inappropriate to him. Honesty, he said to his books, is a slippery customer, it always slips away methinks when we believe we are surrounded by it. Levadski breathed on the magnifying glass again and polished it on his sleeve. Methinks! What a way to express myself! That he had a long time ago thought of winning over the opposite sex with this pathetic affected behavior, when his head had been filled with nothing but the mating dances and brooding habits of birds, was something he did not want to be reminded about. But he did think about it, he thought about it with a hint of bitterness. After a fulfilling academic life he knew: Women would have interested him more if they hadn’t constantly insisted on emphasizing that they were different from men. If they had been like female birds, a touch grayer and quieter than the males, perhaps they would have awakened his interest at the right time. Levadski would gladly have procreated with such a creature. Only he didn’t know to what purpose.
Levadski took a book from the shelf and blew the dust from it. Dictionary of the Language of Ravens by Dupont de Nemours, incomplete edition. A French ornithologist colleague had hidden the facsimile inside a cake, smuggled it through the Iron Curtain in time for Levadski’s seventieth birthday. Levadski’s delight in the facsimile had gotten the better of his reason to such an extent that he kissed the Frenchman on his moustache in front of the entire professoriate. Somebody raised his glass, he could remember that, and said, “A kiss without a moustache is like an egg without salt!” Everybody drank to international friendship and raven research, the words “May the day come when …” and “A clear conscience should not be a utopia” rang out. People clinked glasses and patted each other on the back. “From the primeval fish to the bird: a stone’s throw!”; “From the lungfish to the human: the bat of an eye!” They hoped he would gain many years of pleasure from this unique and scientifically speaking totally uninteresting book. His anniversary was at the same time a farewell. He left the university and the students — everything that he had never really been attached to — with the thought that he would not live much longer. “Adieu, mon ami!” Levadski had tried to joke when he stood opposite the Frenchman at the airport. The Frenchman nodded hastily and withdrew from Levadski’s brotherly kiss feigning a coughing fit. In the airplane the man with the moustache suffered a heart attack. For a time, Levadski was under the illusion that he had brought about the demise of his French colleague with his collegial kiss. If he’d explained to him that it was the custom in his country, like a weak handshake in Central Europe, perhaps the good man wouldn’t have died.
“Such a beautiful book,” said Levadski. He said it loud enough for the other books to hear. “This, children, is how the destiny of a man fulfills itself,” Levadski continued ceremoniously. “A stranger arrives, makes a present to a stranger and gives up the ghost!” The books listened as if Levadski hadn’t already told this story twenty times. “When, you won’t believe it, on that very day, I was thinking that I would have to die soon! Such a beautiful gift …”
Levadski opened the book and smoothed out the pages, his knuckles cracking. He made a cracking noise with every motion, he always had since he was a child. Even when he sighed or sneezed. Once he had a bout of hiccups where every hiccup was accompanied by a cracking noise and he kept on cracking. A whole day passed by like this. Levadski turned the pages of the dictionary with a great sense of pleasure.
Kra, Kre, Kro, Kron, Kronoj
Gra, Gres, Gros, Grons, Gronones
Krae, Krea, Kraa, Krona, Krones
Krao, Kroa, Kroä, Kronoe, Kronas
Kraon, Kreo, Kroo, Krono, Kronos
It’s a blessing I know French, thought Levadski, otherwise I would have had to learn it at the age of seventy to read this gem of a book. Simply and unassumingly the content of the language of ravens had been scraped together and distributed over twenty-seven pages, silent and powerful. Levadski remembered the bad mood he had fallen into every time he read the dictionary. Every time he stumbled over the word which suggested that man, in his search for enlightenment, had possibly overlooked the decisive junction — a word from the language of ravens. Which one was it? Levadski turned the pages and felt a surge of heat creeping up his hunched back.
Kra (quietly, deliberately, talking to himself) — I am
Kra (quietly, drawn out) — I am fine; or I am ready
Kra (short staccato) — Leave me
Kra (tenderly, coquettishly) — Hello; or Wake up; or
Excuse the tomfoolery
Kra (questioningly, long) — Is somebody there?
Which word was it then?
Krao (loud and demanding) — Hungry
Kroa (chokingly) — Thank you, thank you so much,
such a pleasure
Karr (resolutely) — Adieu!
Kro …
Kronos! Kronos was the word! “Let us fly” in the language of ravens, chronos in Greek. Levadski shut the book. It was this junction that mankind had rushed past, past its own kinsfolk — past its brother animal. And along with it, consideration of the existence of a common primeval language had been buried! “Dear books,” Levadski said to his library, “that contemporary animal psychology stubbornly refuses to credit the higher vertebrates with the power of abstraction and a center of speech is not only a scandal. It is a disaster! The existence of a common primeval language is perfectly obvious. Tell me, does the animal give the impression of being apathetic? On the contrary, the animal looks lively and inquisitive, not because it has just laid an egg, but because it possesses language. Language …” raved Levadski, craning his neck. “Just like us the animal has named and internalized all the objects and impressions known to it. Otherwise the animal would long ago have died in isolation, darkness and silence, and even its heightened animalism would not have been able to compensate for its lack of speech. The animal has made sense of the world like we have, by naming this world!”
Moist-eyed, Levadski shuffled along the bookshelves and continued in a more hushed tone: “When humanity started to hone its mental and manual skills and continued to improve them, a thick civilizing fog spread over us, so that we either thought ourselves close to God or abandoned by God. But, my God, how pathetic! All we ever did was widen the gap between him and us. Between the animals and ourselves.”
Levadski spoke to his books as if to his most gifted students. “A common primeval language appears to be physiologically and philologically undisputed. But from where is philology meant to take the means to prove that animals have a faculty for speech and explore their grammar?” The approving silence of the books spurred Levadski’s eloquence on. “The day will come,” he continued, “when the dictionaries of animal language will no longer cause their authors to be taunted and ridiculed, but bring them fame and honor. The authors will demurely lower their eyes.” Slightly embarrassed, Levadski stared at the floor on which balls of dust were being driven back and forth by the draft. “Despondent because they arrived too late at the thought of recognizing in the animal an equal neighbor, a friend who can be confidently ascribed a language and an immortal soul once again, after such a long time …”