“You are kind, Habib.”
Black spider webs burgeon in Habib’s nostrils, a tiny insect intermittently twitches in one of them. If he were to sneeze, the little thing would fly out of his nose and trace a high arc, Levadski thinks. He wants to say something nice to the butler but he remains silently slumped in his armchair. Habib, hands folded, appears to be waiting for something.
“I am an old man,” Levadski interrupts the silence. His voice sounds muted, as if the walls of the room were thickly carpeted and not fitted with silk wallpaper. “I am an old man,” he repeats firmly, “I will die soon.” A laughing matter too, thinks Levadski. “I will die,” he says once more. Habib’s chin sinks to his chest, as if he wants to sleep.
“I am not in this hotel for fun,” Levadski continues, “I don’t want you to form the wrong impression of me.” Habib’s eyes are two fresh graves covered in hoarfrost.
“I came back to the city of my childhood. Not even childhood. I returned to the city of my blessed mother. In order to die, so I thought. But I don’t think the money will suffice for that. My God, have I grown so tough, too tough for death?” Habib looks like he is fast asleep. A fly is circling on an invisible turntable above him.
“Even the fact that I deceived my old apartment and became a traitor, an adulterer, is no longer painful. That is how tough I have become. I swapped it for a luxurious lover, for this suite, for grandeur and the strangely delightful view — over there the pharmacy, a kiosk, a taxi stand, the streetcar tracks, hooded crows’ nests. With the stroke of a pen I eliminated all those shared years with my apartment. But it is not painful anymore, there is something else that is painful. The joy.” Habib nods, his head rolls to one side, his tongue, a little red flag, is peeking out of his mouth.
“I did everything, everything wrong, you can’t just suddenly die like I was intending to. I am not in pain. Yet, what should I do, what should I do Habib, I have to die, I have to give up the ghost somehow.” A young, almost transparent eel snakes out of Habib’s mouth. The butler sighs deeply in his sleep.
“I wish I could call my family doctor now and tell him, It is all wrong, I don’t have any complaints, I can’t for the life of me die, Professor Doctor, but his number is in my notebook, which is lying beside my telephone. It is an old fashioned model, I don’t know whether you would even know the type. The telephone is gathering dust in my apartment, which I swapped for this suite here. For death in luxury. Where Death is, I would like to know. In the city by the sea, on a park bench, where I was in the habit of sitting for hours on end until I grew cold. Maybe Death is sitting there and spitting on its scythe. Is sitting and spitting its hissing saliva … Even if I call my family doctor and report on my completely inappropriate condition, what use is it to me? I wouldn’t feel any worse. Of course I could accuse him of having made me the false promise of death, but what would I gain? That I decided to celebrate my infirmity and my approaching end in luxury is my problem. That I can’t just insist on languishing and dying is also my problem. What fault is it of the doctor’s that I can’t go back? That I can’t stay here either? The money will suffice for a few more weeks. And then?” In Habib’s deep silence the wind is playing with the well bucket. A mouse is gnawing at the rope.
“My apartment is locked. Dust clings to the books of my library, and the little radio, and to Radio World Harmony. Dust and ash from the bridges that are burning. My good old apartment. There is no going back anymore, Habib. I feel fine, the end is not in sight. Do you understand what that means?” In Habib’s silence, cannons are being stuffed with gunpowder, a crow flies over a sundrenched plain, a messenger between two enemy camps. It is fall.
“Not so long ago I stepped into the golden elevator of the hotel. It was a delight to hover in the elevator. I felt like I was in my mother’s lap, beyond good and evil. A possibility occurred to me then. I imagined dying a more pleasant death than the one prescribed me by my illness. A beautiful, horrific death, unworthy of a scientist. A magical disappearance. I imagined riding up to the last floor and looking out the window into an empty crow’s nest. In that instant I am dead.” Habib’s eyelids twitch in his sleep. He is running for his life.
“I never looked in empty bird’s nests, Habib. From the moment I started admiring birds I always knew: I can do what I like, I can observe birds through a telescope, I can sketch them, count them, play to them on a whistle, I can roast them and eat them, make handles for my desk drawers from their bare bones — I could do everything. But if one day I should look through the bare twigs of trees into an empty nest, I would be done for.” A sleepy smile blossoms on Habib’s face. Levadski places his hand on his heart.
“A forbidden fruit that means more than death. The look into an empty bird’s nest obliterates everything: my curiosity for life would have been erased, my joie de vivre, my respect for a miracle of creation — the bird. Looking into a friend’s chamber pot is nothing by comparison. Then I looked around in the elevator and scrutinized my four mirror-images, they all panted down my neck and said: Let it be, my friend, go and enjoy breakfast instead, until you can no longer get up. Wander from window to window in your suite, watch the bustle in the street, the old ladies with their comical lapdogs, after all it makes you happy, doesn’t it? I glanced up at the mirrored ceiling of the elevator. Ride up to the fifth floor, my fifth double whispered to me, look into a bird’s nest, give yourself the last blow, rob yourself of joy, die!” Habib’s mouth twitches, as if he has bitten into an electric cable.
“I suspect that my dear departed father looked into an empty bird’s nest before taking his life in the forest. Out of boredom. He was a dreamer, but who knows who he really was? Perhaps, and that would be far worse, he planned and carried it out consciously because he foresaw the future, the war, the revolution, hunger. The most pleasant conception is that there was no bullet, just a look — a blue titmouse whirs past my father’s breaking eye, to a distant and unreachable branch … While I was hovering in the elevator on the way to breakfast, I understood my father, whom I never knew. For a split second I felt a deep sense of understanding within me. That’s how it is, Habib.” Levadski wipes his mouth and carries on talking.
“What I am left with, in my situation, is hope in the power of thought. There is, after all, an internal alarm clock. I often used to get up by telling myself before going to sleep, Tomorrow at seven on the dot. And at seven o’clock on the dot I would leap out of bed as if I had been stung by bees. Do you know that internal alarm clock?” In Habib’s silence, flags flutter, spurs jangle, clumps of grass are whirled about by horse hooves, slowly, like corals overgrown with seaweed.
“All I can do is wind that internal clock up again and rely on it: drop dead in two weeks. What do you say to that?” Black smoke pours from Habib’s mouth, a barn full of pigs and piglets is burning. It is wartime. Wartime or just a storm.
“There is nothing else I can do but trust in this clock, trust in the power of thought …” A question that loses its urgency is written in Habib’s wide-open eyes. They are hazy, dream-veiled images which remain an unfathomable secret to himself. A glance at the watch above the white glove — a day has passed, or maybe even two, and still Habib remains seated. Day after day he enters Levadski’s suite and stays sitting on a pouf with no back support, the most beautiful piece of furniture in Levadski’s suite.
Levadski pulls his handkerchief that looks like a trampled concertina from his pocket and dries his forehead. “There is something I can’t get out of my head. Habib. It was a long time ago. I was on the way home with my mother. Sometimes we came across a farmer who let us sit up on his team of elk. The further we got, the more astonished the farmers were who gave us a ride. The elk turned into bony farm horses. Summer turned to winter. We rode on the roof of an icy train, too, but most of the time we went on foot. We walked along the snowy rails, wrapped in the furs of farm animals we had raised in a kolkhoz, fed and then skinned. We knew we had a long journey ahead of us, straight across Eurasia, you understand what that means? I was your age. Although half your size. We didn’t eat much in exile, but healthily. Mainly mare’s milk and cheese. I assume that’s why I lost my teeth when I was very old and not at the age of fifty like my colleagues.