Who Is Martha? Read Online Free

an accomplice. With the left side of his body Levadski sensed that the woman was smiling. He felt her smile like a small blazing glow. He closed his eyes. His old friend the robin redbreast with the tick close to its eye sprang to his mind.
    “Are you smiling because I just said hurray?” he asked, opening his eyes.
    “Yes,” said the lady and burst into an ominous fit of coughing. “Excuse me,” she choked, “a crumb.” The pigeon with the leg injury took a couple of steps backwards and stared at the coughing woman with distrust.
    “Friendship Square used to be a treasure of the town,” Levadski said. “It was at its most beautiful in winter. We youngsters would come here with buckets of water, lay down a patch of ice in front of the Monument to the General and skate to our heart’s content.” The coughing woman closed her book and kept on clearing her throat. Levadski took the opportunity to squint over at the title of the book. Intelligible Science: On the Life of Bees . The lady knitting and the lady who had befriended the pigeon made a point of looking away. Levadski sighed. How many girls had he kissed under the supervision of the General. On the neck like a bloodsucker. Yes, Friendship Square had been something special once; every blind man would have been pleased to be warned by caring fellow citizens of the falling chestnuts. And now? Ingratitude wherever you looked!
    “You know,” he said to his bench companion, “I used to think that people who said ‘Everything used to be different’ were dreadful. Now such people are brothers and sisters to me!”
    A couple, closely entwined, wandered past the bench, looking like an animal on four hind legs. The open shoe-laces of their shoes whipped to the left and right, throwing up dust. “You wouldn’t have seen a thing like that in my day,” Levadski said in a purposely loud voice. The couple stopped, kissed and moved on. “Disgusting!” Levadski grumbled and licked his lips. The missing dentures were giving him a hard time. Slowly his muscles were starting to ache from talking. He was not used to talking so much. Five or six words directed at himself were usually the daily norm. The General was enthroned on his mighty horse. A magpie relieved itself on the man’s uncovered head, its wings and tail feathers iridescent. “Chacker chacker,” the magpie called and cumbersomely flew onto the tip of a fir tree close by. “A pretty animal,” said Levadski, then turned to his neighbor and saw that she was gone. The woman with the knitting and the pigeon-lady had turned into two smoking students.
    Levadski got up and continued on his way. What I desperately need is a stick with a silver handle, he thought while crossing Friendship Square, a silver handle where the evening sun can play. My God, all the things I have missed in my life! His mood improved with every cobble-stone he left behind him. Now and again he stopped and wiped the sweat from his face. He leaned against traffic light poles while waiting for them to turn green. He avoided the underpass. He skirted around the gypsies and the newspaper vendors. Everybody else made way for him, Luka Levadski, Professor Emeritus of Zoology. Neither respectfully, nor filled with repulsion, but mechanically, like water separating from oil. Cosmonauts Street yawned at him with its two rows of sycamore trees that led to the heart of the city; to the shops with the indispensable items: the silver walking stick, the shirts, the snow-white handkerchiefs and a fashionable bowler hat. If I don’t watch out I will turn into a dandy, Levadski thought, gleefully balling his wrinkled hands into fists in his trouser pockets. He felt a tear welling up inside of him, round and large like a diving bell. Covered in sweat, Levadski got into a taxi. “To the end of the street, please,” he said to the raised eyebrows of the taxi driver in the rear mirror, and leaned back with a wheezing sigh.
    In response to the buxom