“But they are all birds!” shouted the little Levadski.
“Humans, you mean,” his mother corrected him. “Oh, I don’t understand anything anymore myself!”
When Levadski reached the forester’s house with his mother, a veil had descended over the conversation. When he bent over the steaming chicken broth, the conversation about birds and humans sank like a chestnut in a mirrored lake. And when he sat in a train for the first time, between whimpering soldiers with bandaged arms, legs and heads, the picture of the widower behind the closed door was no longer even a circle of water in the pond of his memory.
Behind his mother’s aunts was the stale air of their apartment, a silent third presence. Levadski greeted all three of them on the threshold with a bow and stumbled in. “This is where we are going to live,” Levadski’s mother announced, her eyes moist.
Several times a week Levadski ate cake with his great-aunts in the most beautiful hotel in Vienna. He ate cake until he had grown eight inches, he ate it for three whole years. After cake, Levadski devoured the golden sound of music. In the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, a few steps from the hotel, he was steeped in a pleasure even sweeter than chocolate cake.
IV
WHILE LEVADSKI’S MOTHER CHANGED THE DIAPERS OF elegant ladies’ children and took them out for walks in their strollers in the fresh air, Levadski’s great-aunts dragged the unexpected consolation of their old days into the Musikverein. On a thinly upholstered chair with his short legs dangling, he listened on long evenings to symphonic works, to concerts for piano and orchestra, for solo piano, for piano duets and for two pianos. He listened to secular and religious choral pieces with and without orchestra, and learned to appreciate the benefits of the cheapest balcony seats directly above the orchestra. The paneled ceiling formed a kind of resonant expanse that seemed to intensify the music, to gather it and hurl it down on nobody but Levadski.
“We are sitting in the belly of an architectural masterpiece,” the great-aunts whispered to Levadski with sour breath. Solemn, for the golden notes of the hall were solemn, the blue ceiling fresco with Apollo’s nine muses, the cool white of the sculptures above the balcony doors. Solemn were the movements of the violinists when they dabbed their beads of perspiration, solemn were the embroidered initials on their chin cloths. Incredibly solemn were the tear-stained faces of the music lovers that Levadski could see from his cheap seat, shimmering in the discreet light of the crystal chandeliers: all the red noses that acquired a prophet-like dignity in these solemn surroundings.
“You will understand it one day,” the sour breath of the great-aunts assured him. Levadski already understood now that music had to be a question of magic — what other possible explanation could there be for the two sisters seeming less ugly when the music began to play? Even during the intermissions it was an ugliness sugared in a soft golden dust that they radiated. The music itself was perfume! It smelled of the powder of his aunts’ décolletées leaning over the balustrade, like polished brass plate and the sweat of the musicians.
While a rattling Rachmaninoff swept across the stage and the blurry-eyed music buffs wiped their noses, Levadski leaped through sun-drenched meadows of flowers, embraced thousand-year-old trees, nimbly flitted up their resinous trunks and drowned in oceans filled with fish. He couldn’t know that one day music would be reduced to a three-tiered smell in his head. To the smell of powder, brass and sweat.
There sat Levadski, leaning against a cool pillar. When the music excited him too much, he would gently knock his head against the pillar. Most of the time a lady with binoculars sat next to him, taking up two seats. Through her binoculars she looked down on the oily bald heads of the double bass players and smiled mysteriously or licked her painted red lips. During the intermission she made up for her two cheap seats with a caviar canapé. When she directed her binoculars at the double bass players again after the intermission, a dark caviar egg hung in her smile. Right next to her sat an old man napping behind the pearly sheen of a pair of pince-nez. During brass-filled sections he would start up and finger his tailcoat — he was here. He was. He was he. And again sweet slumber beckoned — the old man succumbed to reveries until the next brass attack. Opposite Levadski on the other side of the concert hall a young emaciated girl sat swaying, opera glasses in hand. To the right and left of her, women with gray chignons were dozing. Beneath her were surging waves of the educated middle class with starched collars of a white immune to any kind of criticism in the subdued light.
“They used to crack open bottles of champagne here,” one of the great-aunts sighed, “I miss the popping.” Her breath drove into Levadski’s left nostril in the form of a sour pickle.
“Much better,” her sister whispered, “this way you can enjoy the intensity of the music more.” And a second sour pickle blocked Levadski’s right nostril. How blissfully he sneezed in the Musikverein! How blissful the pain of the repressed sneezing and the subsequent goose bumps!
It was in the Musikverein that Levadski for the first time also heard the conflicting descriptions that the music lovers gave to the music. Mouths concealed behind hands, leaning towards each other or sitting upright with glassy mad eyes directed at the orchestra, they declared of the music:
“Heavenly tootling!”
“Excruciating whining.”
“Shush …”
“A spicy butchery of melodies.”
“Vile harmonics, but interesting.”
“Incredibly inflated. Still, nice instrumental effects.”
“Deathly boring — the same rhythm over and over again.”
“Be quiet!”
“A charming mess!”
Invisible occurrences were also noted.
“The double basses are dragging themselves laboriously.”
“The violins are skulking.”
“The blaring trumpets doubling up on the violins.”
The music itself was inspired to action.
“But now, hop, hop, hop!”
“Stab and pull! Stab and pull!”
“Heeey, heeey get on with it!”
And many ambiguous notions were uttered in a state of euphoria.
“One wall of thunder after the other, how refreshing!”
“The indulgences of this genius transcend the spheres.”
“Sugared water on my head, Lotte, I am flying!”
It was obvious: only a lover was capable of speaking about music like this, someone who really knew it. Levadski was surrounded by pure music lovers. Withered ladies with glittering dangling earrings belonged to this circle of lovers, youngsters with red cheeks and long aching fingers belonged, too. Sobbing chambermaids in plain dresses were friends of music, and even the clergy rolled their eyes up at the hollow paneled ceiling, grateful for music on earth and the gift of hearing.
The progenitors of music appeared to be the musicians on the stage. Damned to eternal reproduction, they were in the child Levadski’s eyes nothing but soulless puppets.
It was not difficult to guess what the conductor’s role was: the gate through which the sacred composer protruded his dragon’s tongue. For the duration of a symphony, a concerto or a piano concert, the conductor appeared to relinquish his body and his personality. The conductor’s pitted shell allowed something better than itself to rule and triumph. But on closer observation this turned out not to be the case. The conductor did after all inhabit his body. The reason for his writhing like a person possessed was frighteningly mundane: because he was torn back and forth between having to control himself and at the same time having to forget himself. The conductor was meant to follow the composer’s blueprint but also his own ideas, his volatile temperament and the moment. Whom to do justice to? The composer, the audience, or himself? How could you not go mad in the process?