by Andrei Bitov
“I thought I had returned to pick up the manuscript. How much time had passed? Three days? Three years? I felt my face blazing with fire, I was covered in perspiration. It wasn’t shame, or pain, or fear, or pangs of conscience, or repentance … It was … There are no words for the sense of irreparable damage I felt, and felt I had caused. ‘Dika!’ I screamed, and started running.
“The lock didn’t fit the key, the door opened in the wrong direction … and there was no Dika. Everything was pristine and empty. It was more empty than when Dika simply wasn’t home. The parrot was gone, too. The cage was empty—that was it. Three days? Three years? I groped around on the table, searching for a note. The blinds were pulled, and there was no light to see by. My hand couldn’t find the switch … Finally, there was light. The note shook my hands, the lines veered past my gaze. I put it back on the table, on the exact spot where it had lain, and, gripping the edge to steady myself, I made out the words: Jacko flew away. I went to look for him. The porridge is on the stove. Love, E. This should have reassured me, but it didn’t. ‘Three days? Three years?’ I mumbled, circling the room. I brushed up against a pile of books and knocked them over. They spilled and spilled, and scattered about like oatmeal flakes. ‘Porridge!’ I exclaimed, and rushed over to the stove. The porridge was still warm! It couldn’t have stayed warm for three days, much less three years. Time contracted violently, like a living thing, like a heart. I should have felt reassured by all of this, but I didn’t. Time contracted to today, to this moment, to a point, and then stopped, like a heart. A needle, finer than the sliver of an instant, pierced my heart like time. I closed my eyes and imagined I saw the chair, the one from our first night, with a pile of folded clothes on it, like the clothes of one recently deceased. I opened my eyes in alarm—the chair was empty. And, still, my heart wasn’t beating.
“Then I rushed like a madman in the direction of the Zoological Gardens. Why the zoo? I don’t really know how to explain it. I was certain she was there, that’s all. It was only later that I was able to imagine how it must have been … How she waited and waited for me … How she forgot to lock the cage … How it grew stuffy in the room and she opened the window … How suddenly, with the ineluctability of insight, she understood that I was gone and wasn’t coming back, understood because Jacko had flown away … How she rushed after the parrot, as though rushing in pursuit of me … How she dashed through the streets, crying, ‘Jacko! Jacko! Have you seen my parrot?’
“What came next? An automobile? A streetcar? ‘No! No!’ I screamed as I ran. The conjecture gripped me so suddenly that I was absolutely certain, just as she had been when she realized in her despair: Of course, Jacko had flown away to find his OWN! Where else? So she ran, joyfully, almost flying, gasping with happiness that he was there, in the zoo. Where else could he have gone…?
“For the hundredth time she combed the Zoological Gardens—oh, that overpopulated desert where there was no Jacko! ‘My dear! My dear! Please come back!’ she called. But he wasn’t there. His absence seemed to grow. Little fool! What a little fool you are, Dika! You can’t find him; he can only return to you. He’s sure to return! He’s flying home already … Dika! It’s me! I’ve come after you … Where are you? Dika wasn’t there. Suddenly I saw a crowd, a small crowd, on the edge of the park where the chamois were, and after that the ape house … I made my way toward them. Most likely the little fool ran first of all to the parrots. Of course there was no Jacko there. Or, rather, there were hundreds, but none of them answered to her call, or else all of them would at once. But just at that moment, several zookeepers ran by in a panic with nets and boathooks, as though a fire had broken out. No doubt they’re after my Jacko, thought crazy Dika, and she dashed off after them.
“I tore off in pursuit of the invisible Dika. You can see into the future more quickly at a run. The crowd parted silently to let me pass. A doctor in a white coat stood there, smoking indifferently. Next to him stood one of the zookeepers—in a gray uniform, with an inconsolable monkey in her arms. On a stretcher lay … No! Never! What do you mean? You’re out of your mind … Dika! Wake up! It’s me, I’m here … I made it!
“She had raced right behind the people with nets and boathooks. No one tried to stop her, either because they were too distracted by other matters, or because they took her for a fellow zookeeper, a novice, in their panic. Straight toward Dika, with a shriek, hurtled a monkey—a little chimpanzee, just a babe in arms. Tame, and used to being lavished with caresses … Why did he choose her out of all the others? She so wanted a child. The little chimpanzee so wanted to be saved. Who else would save him? Everyone else scattered helter-skelter to avoid him, as though they were running from the plague or a leper. They knew what was happening. Dika didn’t know. Even if she had known, would she really have jumped aside, turned away from that little tyke hurtling toward her with its terrified shrieks and yowls, desperate for help, for salvation? At the last minute, the little chimpanzee leapt. He flew like a cannonball at breakneck speed straight toward Dika. She didn’t see that behind it, stretching out in a transparent gray thread, something else was flying through the air … Like a goalkeeper, Dika caught the warm, living ball of terror. The little monkey, sobbing and howling, threw its arms around her neck and pressed itself to her, trembling uncontrollably … And the gray unseen thing fell short of its goal and plopped down at her feet with a naked gray thud … and began twining itself around her. And the little monkey kept whimpering and clasping her neck, covering her with kisses. That was her last embrace on this Earth.”
… Vanoski went quiet. Tears streamed down his face—literally streamed. I had never seen anything like it. An unbroken stream. He didn’t wipe them away.
Why was I so angry with him? I didn’t know. I wanted to tell him that I had read it already in a book—moreover, his book. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.
“I know you find it implausible,” Vanoski said with a sigh. “But that doesn’t matter to me. I prefer it this way. She’s waiting for me there. I’ve had a slight delay; but that’s all right. She waited for me here even longer. You’d like to know how it really was? It’s hard for me to remember what I have written and what I have lived. I think it all really happened, because this time I recounted everything from memory. I didn’t invent anything. Perhaps you’re right, I’m—a writer … An unhappy creature! Everyone thinks that choosing what to write about is the hardest thing. No, the hardest thing is to think up the one who’s writing. All the writers we read and revere were able to summon up within themselves someone who writes for them. And who are they, then, besides the ones who write? It’s horrifying to imagine this solitude. Only other people are happy: they labor, love, give birth, die. Those who write can’t die, either. They aren’t cut out for it. They are like actors, only they play one role their whole lives: themselves. For others. Their lives don’t belong to them. They are slaves of others, slaves of those who love them. They don’t know how to love, just as monks don’t know how to believe. If you love and believe, why write or pray? You love a living woman—and it’s an image; you reach toward God—and it’s words; you fall to Earth—and it’s your homeland. If you’re a writer, the Earth shoves you out, larger than life, like a monument, like relics, so that you don’t linger on Earth but in your homeland, unburied after all …
“I have always dreamed of one thing only: giving up writing and being able to live. Oh, I could have! And I wouldn’t have written another word. With the utmost satisfaction. To my profound delight. I almost managed to love! Fate took it away. We were already leaving the altar when she trod on that gray, unseen … It was raining, and we were running, clasping each other by the hand, laughing, away from the city hall to the car. She got tangled in the hem of her wedding dress, lost her slipper … and landed with her heel on the bare electrical cable … But there had been a way out! I had always had a way out—to love. I could have vanquished the one with the briefcase and the photographs through love alone, as in a fairy tale. Cou
ld have sent him on his way, and not attached any meaning to this forgery … because it was a forgery! I forged my whole life according to it. If only it had been just mine … If only I were a scoundrel. If only I had abandoned Dika, or the Frenchwoman, even the Dutch woman, for love. But no. Not one of them! I could definitely have loved the hairdresser … But I only loved ONE: that paper Helen. I had a dream about that, too.
“After Dika’s death, I burned the novel and refused to leave the house. Someone brought me my meals. Maybe it was even the hairdresser, but I don’t recall any woman. A year later I dreamed I was flying over a painting or an etching of a country, perhaps Greece, which looked like one of Picasso’s graphics on a mythological subject, only it was more conventional, and more parodic. There below me reigned a bacchic idyll: sheep, goats, shepherds, shepherdesses … And they were all making love. They were also made of paper, like children’s dolls cut out of the lined pages of a notebook. It was like the dream itself was on lined notebook paper. The vision of their paper love made me laugh at first, then it amused me, then it intrigued me. I felt I was just as papery, but just as capable of love as they were. I flew around looking for a girlfriend, but they were all engaged. My ability grew, but there was no girlfriend to be found. Finally, I saw one. I descended; she opened herself to accept my embraces. I swooped down on her … and then I became myself, no longer paper, but flesh and blood, and I felt myself rip bodily through this page from a school notebook.
“That was the day I went out into the city for the first time. I wandered aimlessly, peering again into faces, but no longer in search of the mythical Helen, not differentiating between women and men, just studying people’s faces: What are they like, and who are they, these people? I stopped into cafés, stores, parks—and left without sitting down, without eating, without buying anything. I was tired, so I decided to go home. Then I found I was no longer walking, but standing, standing in front of a display window and looking dully at two mannequins, male and female, who seemed to be striding toward one another with outstretched arms, to embrace at last, only something prevented them. Was it my reflection between them? And then, through the display window, between the mannequins, I saw her: Helen from the photograph. For this time it was she, down to the minutest detail. How could I have failed to notice this shop before? I had passed this place thousands of times in my life during my quests! But it was new, a store that had just opened during the past year, while I was secluded in my room. I calculated—exactly seven years had gone by. And while I was standing there, dumbstruck, turning over these simple calculations in my mind, Helen emerged through the glass doors, dressed as she was in the photograph, with a shopping bag, like the one in the photograph … She glanced at me, as she had in the photograph, without registering any feeling, as though glancing at a thing, and walked on. I kept standing there, rooted to the spot. Then, in the display window, I saw my own ghastly face from the photograph, with snakes growing from my head instead of hair. I screamed, and rushed after her—to kill her. ‘Kill’ is not the right word here, though: I thought I could rip her to shreds, like a photograph, so certain was I that she was made of paper. It wouldn’t have been murder—just scraps of paper scattered about on the street. But SHE was gone. She had disappeared.
“Ripping her up—that was nothing. It was still not the end. When she vanished, and I was unable to catch her, I understood that I had yet again fallen into temptation by the one with the briefcase, that I should have caught hold of her and held on for dear life. I should have urged myself on her and fallen in love with her at last, unto death. This was my last chance to revive fate, and I had missed it. Oh, how blind I had been my whole life: waves, mirrors, paper, photographs …
“I embarked on a new quest then, though I knew it was doomed from the outset. I wrote something called The Burning Novel. It was a novel in which the characters didn’t say a word. No, you couldn’t have read that one, either, for the same reason … I don’t know what you’ve read of mine—I have been writing these two books my entire life, nor have I ever finished writing either of them. Perhaps they were in fact one novel and not two. In the sequel the protagonist returns to his first love and to his first, abandoned, novel … In that book it turns out he had a son, a grown-up boy who is a deaf-mute. His mother hasn’t spoken to him, out of solidarity with her son, for fourteen years. The protagonist settles down with them again and finishes writing his very first novel, amidst this embodied muteness. In this novel he…”
I think Vanoski recounted his novel to me to the end; but he no longer saw me. I quietly slipped out of his little shoebox. My God! How wonderful life is! How sweetly the dusty urban lilacs smell of benzine! Of what use are success, money, and glory to him? Why do they come to those who not only have no more need of them, but who never needed them to begin with?
And then I recalled Vanoski’s words, the ones he had spoken when I was feeling such antipathy toward him that I had stopped listening:
“All the same, he didn’t conquer me. I know that for sure now. He only conquered me in this life; but in that one he can’t vanquish me. In that one I’m stronger. My Dika is there with me…”
And I realized why I had turned against him: it was because of his Dika. Because she is his, and not mine. What good is my youth to me without her?
O: NUMBER OR LETTER?
(Freud’s Family Doctor)
FROM A Fly on a Ship, A BOOK BY U. Vanoski
“Did you fall from the Moon?”
“Yes,” he said.
His “yes” was calm and bore no trace of challenge. The laughter that followed in the wake of his answer no longer injured him. Had he been aware of it, this circumstance would even have gladdened him. But he wasn’t aware of it, and was somewhat abashed that he hadn’t fully lived up to their expectations. For some reason, though, they guffawed even more than usual. This put him on his guard. He stared in wide-eyed surprise at the encroaching, wobbling surface of unfamiliar faces—at the mounds of cheeks and foreheads, the chasms of eyes, the clefts between teeth. This carnival-mirror surface of faces reminded him of another surface, another landscape. Then he recalled where he had been going, excused himself, and set off down Sunday Street toward where it ended, merging gently and imperceptibly into a faded meadow. Here, the laughter straggled behind, then died away altogether. Invisible insects began their chirring, and identical butterflies hovered and dipped in haphazard motion. A dirigible—a phenomenon whose novelty would disappear almost overnight—floated in the sky. The sun had been warming the meadow all day, and now the grasses released a lazy, parched heat. Once he had passed the meadow he was just a stone’s throw away … there, where the brown cow was grazing … He moved as though he were walking through shallow water, lifting his feet high and planting them down into the motionless heat, the pungent smells, the chirring. He screwed up his eyes in satisfaction. He was quite happy: he had something to tell Dr. Davin today, and even something to show him. In his hands he carried a bicycle handlebar.
* * *
Toni “Gummi” Badiver had shown up in these parts not too long ago. He was found on the side of the road, on the Northern Highway, three miles from Taunus. He was unconscious, bleeding, and covered in scratches. Samuelsen the night-soil man, who picked him up, concluded that he was dead drunk and, out of a sense of camaraderie, delivered him to the police station. On the way there, due to the jolting and lurching of Samuelsen’s mode of transport, the injured man came to and began babbling incoherently about some Brother Hom Laoshan who had beaten him up when he interceded on behalf of the singer Tieng. At the station, however, they were quick to figure out what was what. They locked up Samuelsen in the adjoining cell for his testimony. The man he had delivered could be none other than Toni Badiver, they thought, after finding this name embroidered in crude, red block letters on the lining of his flimsy, mouse-colored jacket. They were somewhat at a loss to explain why not so much as a whiff of alcohol clung to him, however.
They called in
the medic. He let some blood.
“Nothing serious. Let him sleep it off. You’ll have time to interrogate him later.” The medic was not overly fond of policemen and was ashamed that he worked for them. He dreamed of one day working in Dr. Davin’s clinic. Well, that was his business. To each his own.
The newly delivered Badiver (if that was indeed who he was) slept through the evening, the night, and the following morning. Smogs, the officer on duty, spying on him through the peephole, kept repeating his favorite little joke:
