“Or Flying Dutchman, timeless, simply timeless. Mix gin with an eighth of lime and ice, throw it out the window, done.”
“Or!” the bartender’s voice is attacking Levadski’s nervous system, “the Merry Widow Number One!”
“Number One?” Mr. Witzturn asks, taken aback. Levadski puts his hand to his chest. His dentures are still resting in his mouth. Don’t sleep, he commands himself, don’t bat an eyelid.
“Merry Widow is still a cocktail that many gentlemen like to order for their female company. Dry vermouth, a few squirts of Benedictine and orange bitters, a drop of anisette, gin and a fat lemon, stirred in a mixing beaker and strained into the precooled female countenance. Pure seduction.”
“I’m for drinking neat,” Mr. Witzturn whispers.
The bartender clears his throat. Flying Dutchman is what he would recommend for the gentlemen. Not a syrupy drink, but by all means suitable for ladies. Clear and sleek, soaring flight, sharp descent.
The gentlemen agree.
“I am extremely interested in your piano teacher. When I try and imagine him, I can almost imagine what it is like to lose one’s mind,” Levadski admits. Mr. Witzturn starts rubbing his eyes again.
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Suddenly it was as if I were you and your piano teacher were giving me a piano lesson, not you. And it was I that had told you all the stories you gave me the pleasure of listening to this evening.”
“I don’t understand.” Mr. Witzturn loses several invisible eyelashes as he continues rubbing his eyes. “What difference does it make whether you knew my piano teacher or I knew him? He is dead. That’s the only thing that counts.”
“I hope not,” says Levadski, “I hope not, Mr. Witzturn, we know him, and that should count.”
“Your cocktails, gentlemen.” Levadski is elated.
“How beautifully you have prepared the Flying Dutchman!”
“He knew his music,” Mr. Witzturn says and drinks, without looking Levadski in the eye, “my piano teacher.”
“He still knows his music,” Levadski reassures him after a lengthy pause. “Now he is no longer a medium for you, but you are one yourself.”
“You are a poet,” Mr. Witzturn tries to joke. The soul of a shy male dog barks out from inside him. “You may very well be right. After all, my piano teacher was a devotee of Scriabin. Do you know Scriabin? Scriabin’s desire was not only to be one with the music, but also for music to merge with all the senses. Do you know Scriabin?”
Levadski nods. A desire tickles his throat, the desire to bark, softly, very quietly and unobtrusively. Scriabin is dead, too.
“His idea of absolute music was unique. Scriabin worked on a composition that he programmatically called Mysterium. Here all the arts were to amalgamate into one gigantic Gesamtkunstwerk: music, voice, song, dance, color, scent … The performance of this composition was intended to take place in India and throw everything else into the shadow of what even the most opulent operas had ever been able to offer. Do you understand what it means to be a Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn asks, “to be a devotee of Scriabin? That’s what my piano teacher was.”
“An unfathomable secret,” Levadski murmurs, attempting to impale an ice cube in his glass with a stirrer.
“There are at least two things about Scriabin’s music that are entirely unusual,” Mr. Witzturn carries on. “He started out as a kind of Russian Chopin and ended up by taking giant steps, without running or tripping, at the boundaries of tonality.”
“At the boundaries of tonality,” Levadski repeats, stirring more rapidly in his glass.
“Scriabin,” Mr. Witzturn continues, “never completely said goodbye to Romantic music and a tonal ideal, but broke through many metric, formal and harmonic conventions. This means something, doesn’t it? Conventions!” Mr. Witzturn fumbles with a hand that can’t decide: should it clench itself into a fist or not?
“My mother,” says Levadski, “my mother was my piano teacher, if I may be permitted to call her that. Women like song and dance.”
“They are music,” Mr. Witzturn grins into his glass. Levadski smiles embarrassedly through the ice cube he has jammed between two straws.
“It is only logical that children die after their parents. Everything you think is laughable or unnecessary as a child, you take seriously and consider important in the end — through the magic of death.”
“Magic?” Mr. Witzturn raises an eyebrow. “Very poetic …”
“Yes, magic, it throws a ruthless light on things that are intended to and desire to creep into the lives of those left behind,” says Levadski. His straws tremble and the ice cube sinks into the tides of the cocktail. “My mother was my piano teacher,” Levadski says, poking around in the hollow of an ice cube. “Her tinkling bothered me for as long as she lived. Her vacant face hovering over the piano and above all the clouds and her sweating, even that gave me a fright. Now I still can’t watch the musicians in their ecstasy without feeling horror.”
“Of course, you are confronted with the emptiness that the musicians see. The emptiness makes you scared,” Mr. Witzturn remarks.
“Exactly, or death that is full of promise. Will you be fulfilled or will you be unfulfilled? My mother seemed to simultaneously decompose, burn, to be reduced to molecules when she was playing music. How could it not be frightening? You know, she sent me on my way with something beautiful, something I took no notice of as a boy. A lesson! Something inside me preserved the moment and put it on a pedestal. This pedestal was to be the resting place of the lesson she secretly imparted to me. Would you like to know what the lesson was?” Woe if he says no, thinks Levadski. He could not offend me more deeply.
Mr. Witzturn nods.
“Does that mean yes or no?”
“I feel like I have been transported back to my youth when I am with you,” Mr. Witzturn smiles, “when I was so eager to understand women.”
“Yes or no?”
“I underestimated bad habits like Yes or no, Do you really love me, How do I look, and so forth in my youthful megalomania. I always wanted to grasp a woman in her entirety. That was fatal.”
“One last time — yes or no?”
“Yes, for God’s sake, yes, yes, yes, there is nothing more I long for than to know what the lesson was that your blessed mother taught you!”
“Once my mother drew a comparison to explain how you played a suspension before a chord at the end of a piano piece.” Mr. Witzturn asks him to speak up a little. “If I think about it now,” Levadski clears his throat, “I can now see that the comparison she drew at the time was to become a metaphor for my little life.” Levadski waits in vain for Mr. Witzturn to ask what kind of comparison it was, coughs and carries on: “The piece I was playing was nearing the end, the finish was a soft melancholy minor, but I just wanted to be done and so I played it with equal impatience, something my mother was not at all happy about. Look, she said, up there on the mountain there is a mighty gate in front of a beautiful castle. You are a messenger, riding towards that gate. From a great distance you can hear the old wooden gate snapping shut into its lock. That is the way you are meant to play the suspension.”
“To your mother!” Mr. Witzturn raises his glass, bows his head and fortunately only stabs his cheek with his straw. “Only I don’t see what the lesson to be learned consists of.”
“In the metaphor, Mr. Witzturn, in the metaphor.”
“In the metaphor for what? And what does it have to do with your life? A beautiful castle, a gate snapping shut?”
“My little life,” Levadski mumbles, “yes, my life, perhaps she wanted to make me the gift of a metaphor, as a greeting, as a dowry for my future, and I, I don’t know what …”