When Levadski’s mouth was almost full of milk teeth, his father, who had lost his job, shot a bullet through his head beneath a spruce tree. The old count sent the widow a telegram from Vienna via the war post. DEAR MADAM STOP MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU STOP A SHAME ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND STOP BE BRAVE STOP
When Levadski was able to sketch a bird on four legs, the Tsar abdicated in Russia, his personal cook poisoned himself, the Provisional Government was formed, Lenin, watched by ten thousand pairs of drunken farmers’ eyes, dispatched big words into the frosty air, the landed gentry were dispossessed and churches were ransacked for the good of the people.
When Levadski’s last milk tooth surfaced, the Bolsheviks brought down the Provisional Government. Little Russia declared its independence from Big Russia. “Why did you bring only me into the world?” Levadski asked his mother, who said to him: “So that you could become something special, my little one!”
But in reality it was the untimely disappearance of his father from the forest stage that allowed Levadski to become something special. “He loved the forest, till the very last!” Levadski’s mother enthused. “The forest was his office he stepped in and out of at will, strode through for hours on end, in which he was permitted to shoot and spit on the ground. He would have withered away in the city,” she said time after time, tearfully wiping her nose.
Of all the animals, Levadski’s father loved birds the most. After his death, his young widow inherited a barely overseeable quantity of folders containing bird sketches. The deceased had drawn mallards, waterfowl and little grebes, wagtails, green woodpeckers and collared doves, buzzards, falcons, sparrowhawks, hawks and kites, tree pipits, meadow pipits and tawny pipits, as well as mistle thrushes, redwings, song thrushes and fieldfare. He hadn’t shunned the great white heron, the night heron or the small white heron, either.
Before he sketched them, Levadski’s father would fire a fine-grained shot at his models. He used minute pellets so as to cause as little damage as possible to the bodies. Then, with the use of wire, he would arrange the carcasses in a natural or dramatic pose and sketch them. A stork devours a frog at sunset was for the common people. A stork with hair combed in a revolutionary manner across its brow gazes into the sky and is struck by lightning on the beak — that one was intended solely for Levadski’s father, for his own aesthetic pleasure. It was for this reason that Levadski’s mother called her husband a Neoromantic. “In rejecting the natural, he braved it,” she sighed. “He even spit in the face of the drawing tradition of the 18th century. Your father,” she said to Levadski, wiping a tear from her widow’s eye, “looked far back to the origins of animal worship, hoping for its rebirth. Look!” His mother solemnly grabbed one of the folders and pulled out a sketch.
“A stork,” Levadski instantly remarked.
“A stork for you, a stork for me, a stork as such. But to your father,” she wagged her finger, “it was a stork not struck by lightning, but kissed by it, yes, kissed by it. Suffused with light, the felicitous bird soars above the world in order to clack a delightful song — a representative of the genus of striding birds and at the same time, an angel. Both were not out of the question for your father, may he rest in peace …”
My father was not a bad man, thought Levadski. The sharper his ornithological insight grew, the more this belief took root in him. When he started recognizing the birds that his father had painted out in the wild, he would have spit in anybody’s face who said a bad word about the dead man. Levadski examined the bird sketches conscious of his father’s gaze hiding behind every bird’s eye, the face of a vibrant man, which without a doubt he must have been. “A person who observes birds knows the joy of living,” Levadski’s mother swore, scrunching up her slightly yellowed delicate handkerchief in her withered hand.
“My father was happy, he knew the joy of living!” Levadski shouted to the children in the village, when he believed he was met with a pitying look. Their fathers were farmers, blacksmiths, bakers and butchers, some, in the worst cases, had died in war, were crippled or missing. These children were to be pitied, not him, for his father had known the joy of living. In the evenings their mothers sent them to the tavern to fetch their fathers home from drinking. Levadski would linger close by, leaning against a wall. He was more proud than sad that his father was unable to stagger out of the tavern. He knew the joy of living, he shouted in his head at the children clutching their fathers’ arms, Oh yes, he knew it.
“One day you too will know the birds,” Levadski’s mother promised. And one day this really was the case. Levadski knew them all, and he knew: the joy of living had nothing to do with the bullet his father had fired into his brain. This joy of living conjures up a space for a candid, totally unimpeded joy, smack in the middle of human destiny. This space floats within us like a bubble, and pleasure, its contents, absolves us from everything — our sins, our mistakes, it even pardons the most wretched end. One day Levadski was familiar with the birds and understood: once you have given yourself to the inhabitants of the sky, you are doomed to happiness. You can then happily fire a bullet into your brain.
In August, shortly before the fateful Battle of Amiens, Levadski could brush his teeth with tooth powder all by himself. The young widow decided to lock up the forest warden’s house and to return to Vienna aboard a hospital train. Levadski watched as she took her axe and lopped the heads off all the hens and the old cock. The only reason why the birds had not landed in the stomachs of the marauding fighters in the interest of the right cause was because they had been kept in deep bunker-like cellars during the war years and not in the stable. Only at night, if you held an ear to the cold kitchen floor, could you hear them softly lamenting in their sleep. Singing, Levadski’s mother loaded the carcasses of the birds onto the wheelbarrow and wheeled them, to a melancholy warbling tune, into the village to exchange them for gold with the neighbors. “Eat and remember us,” Levadski’s mother said at every threshold. Levadski wanted to say “Eat and remember us” in front of the last door, but nobody opened. So Levadski said it in front of the closed door.
“Died of starvation,” explained Levadski’s mother, who knew to interpret the sweet smell of decay as the old Jew’s last greeting, “the poor little grandfather.” They headed back. The last hen reproachfully puffed up the sack in the widow’s hand. The old man was dead. Levadski wanted to know why.
“Did he not have anyone to cook for him?”
“He was a widower, just like I am a widow.”
“What does that mean?”
“The male version of me. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“So if I am a widow, he is a widower, you see, an extended version of widow.”
“Why couldn’t the widower eat at the neighbors’?”
“Because he knew they didn’t like him.”
“Why?”
“Because he was not only a widower, but also an old Jew.”
“What is an old Jew?”
“An old Jew is a colorful bird. Remember the bird feeder we made out of fence posts last winter,” Levadski’s mother said, “and the two types of birds that always came to peck the kernels from the stand? The birds are called chickadees and nuthatches. Remember the way it was: the chickadee that was always there didn’t want the other chickadee to eat any of the food and he pounced on his fellow bird. The chickadee left the nuthatches to eat in peace. It’s the opposite with humans. They want to eat together. Birds of a different species are a thorn in their eye.”