“We are in the intermission of the concert and we are leaning on a bistro table.”
“We cannot be sitting here in the ground floor box for the more privileged, Mr. Levadski, because, and now I need to take a deep breath, because everything is flowing. Everything is changing.” Levadski’s eyebrow, in the guise of a thin caterpillar, creeps up towards the plateau of his head, oblivious to the fact that nothing is growing there. “While we sit here in the warm hall, having a civilized conversation, smartly dressed, we are both lying in the gutter half frozen to death with liver disease …”
“Haha!”
“… an ignoramus bringing a child into the world to a working class family …”
“Hahaha!”
“… sweating in a deep coal mine in India, hooligans urinating from a bridge in London …”
“Ha!”
“ … and are thrown behind bars for the tenth time …”
“Muhaha!”
“ … while we were whizzing up and down in the elevator of our hotel …”
“I thought you took the hotel stairs, you athlete!” Levadski clutches his stomach with laughter.
“… while we were pressing on the buttons in the elevator and consuming electricity,” Mr. Witzturn continues, eyes firmly shut, as if he were standing in the pouring rain, “while we were helping ourselves to chocolates from the cake rack and drinking coffee from cups that were far too small, dressed up like two peacocks …” Mr. Witzturn smacks his mouth bitterly, “I don’t know where you were, Mr. Levadski, but I lay between the corpses of my comrades in my own excrement, shooting at people I didn’t know.”
“Please take your seats!” a young man shouts into the crowd of buffet guests.
“This doesn’t mean I am so moved by this knowledge that I cannot either appreciate or enjoy life, Mr. Levadski.” Mr. Witzturn hastily adds, releasing his finger from the tabletop. “Now, more than ever, I am pleased about the illusions I see. Do you know the magic lantern?” Levadski nods and follows Mr. Witzturn to the box. “I presume we live in such a thing. All of us. All human beings.”
“But not the animals!” Levadski places his hand on his heart. “Not the animals!”
“As far as animals are concerned, I don’t have a clue,” Mr. Witzturn says, grasping the door handle to the box. “All I wanted to clarify with my monologue, which is evidently a source of amusement to you, is that we human beings, when we speak of fairness, are talking about a chimera. There is no fairness. There is only fortune and misfortune, two sides of one coin, and something better still.”
“And that would be?”
Mr. Witzturn lets Levadski pass, closes the door to the box behind him, leans his walking stick against the wall and says:
“Pleasure in pleasure.”
Impressive, thinks Levadski in the dimming lights of the ground floor box, and ripe for the stage. Human beings have already come a long way with this all-relativizing belief in a kind of multiple dimensionality of the world. And have always just run around in circles. Loud noises, dramatic curves of tension, a confusion of speculations and exhaustive explanations. But in the animal kingdom, Levadski squints over at Mr. Witzturn, who has closed his eyes again, in the animal kingdom there is no room for this kind of maybe here, maybe there, magic lantern show. There an aged blackbird sits on the tip of a birch tree and chirps the soul out of its body like a young thing, without respite, unshakeable in its love of nature, for the other blackbirds, for its own little life, and the next moment, on account of its age, breathes its last in midsong. That is true fortune.
Annoyed, Levadski has to admit to himself that once again he is not capable of concentrating on the music. He is not even interested in the faces of the female musicians. This would be the ideal time to make use of his opera glasses. But no, Levadski is sulking in the darkness of the box beside the chirping Mr. Witzturn. The more he chirps, the more he moans in his sleep and twitches his legs, the more Levadski hates him. He must be on the chase, the old hand, Levadski thinks, a bat out of hell. Or did he mean to clarify with his trench story that he has lived a more intensive life than I have? Clever, very clever. And how narcissistic, at the expense of all those dead …
Meanwhile the first movement of the symphony, along with its dreams and passions, is drawing to a close. The unhappy lover tastes the all-consuming fire of love and settles himself in the shade of a tree to contemplate his precarious situation. The Symphonie Fantastique was never my thing, Levadski thinks, so it doesn’t matter much that the expensive tickets were a waste — one of us is sleeping, the other is annoyed. And Berlioz himself is also an ambivalent figure in the history of music, it’s very brave of the director of the Musikverein to include this musical adventurer in the program, and Glazunov as well, who was essentially a talentless, whiny boozer. Courageous of the conductor and the orchestra, they’re playing the two of them for all the pseudo friends of music like myself in such a moving way, in an attempt to bring us to life. To hell with music!
With a clumsy gesture of his arm Levadski gives the armchair a thump, along the upholstered back of which Mr. Witzturn’s body flows like dough being forced into a suit and shoes. At least he should pull himself together. After all, the tickets weren’t free. As far as I am concerned, I am a lost cause for the rest of the evening. Levadski shakes the sleeve of Mr. Witzturn’s jacket.
“What do you want?”
“Oh, excuse me, I thought …”
“That I had fallen asleep?” Mr. Witzturn asks sleepily. “It is my right, as a visitor to this noble establishment, it is my primary duty,” he prattles, “to give myself to the music as I please. So, please.” While Mr. Witzturn’s eyes close again, forming two velvet pits, his prominent lower lip swells to an obscenity.
Old crank, Levadski curses in his mind, that’s how he dares to snub me.
The second movement erupts boisterously and a little capriciously over Levadski. A ball, a ball! The love-crazed artist is dancing his feet off beside the creature he worships. A chimera leads the infatuated lover by the nose. He allows himself to be led and misled, thinks Levadski, whereas in the animal kingdom nature won’t tolerate a display of courtship for longer than necessary. But the second movement doesn’t last very long either. A ball, intoxication, a pile of broken glass.
What filthy instrumentation, the repellent harmonics almost make me want to wash myself! Levadski pulls a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and mops the three furrows of his brow. He dries his turkey neck, his eyes; filled with disgust, he wipes his mouth. In the darkness the handkerchief looks to him like it is smeared in blood. With a cry of dismay Levadski throws it on the floor.
“Quiet!” a woman’s voice hisses from the auditorium. Mr. Witzturn doesn’t stir. Levadski carefully feels his face, looking for a wound, but he can’t find anything. He gropes around between the legs of the chair for the hand-kerchief, gets a hold of it and resumes an upright position wheezing, the handkerchief trapped between two fingers. He hits his head hard on the balustrade, and while the handkerchief flutters to the floor again, Levadski, albeit briefly, without inhibition announces his pain to the Golden Hall of the Musikverein.
Mr. Witzturn is startled out of his dream. His scream, occurring only a split second later, joins Levadski’s wail of pain, expressing itself as a distorted echo.
“What a scandal, the two young rascals in the box!”
Levadski can feel the eyes of the concertgoers glaring with anger in the darkness of the auditorium.