The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  The only homogeneous habitat accessible to man is the realm of the spirit. The supreme thought is accessible to each of us, various people at different points in time and on earth can think it, all paths lead to it, but once achieved, it will be one and the same thought. Only at the very summit will we possess the definitively common nature that cancels loneliness, the common nature with which we are born … If someone has reached Truth and someone else is about to reach it, it will be the same Truth, their paths will cross. We are definitively equal only at the very bottom (dust) and at the very top. The rest is journeying. Pilgrims, when they grow weary, look at the sea and the sky—the horizon recedes, and the sky is always as high as ever.

  Thus I interpreted to myself the unfathomable idea of the supreme—thus I daydreamed on this most estranged of earthly surfaces, where the threads of all four dimensions had grown thin, almost invisible. Two of them had worn through. Should the last two wear through, this earthly cloud would fly away, it seemed.

  But the Spit’s narrowness, which essentially eliminated one dimension, could not, even together with the timelessness of sand, water, sky, and solitude, have created this effect, the homogeneity of habitat that I nearly experienced here. And all the other explanations I found for myself were partial—did not explain … For example: this was the westernmost point of the empire, no longer Russia, more likely Germany, what used to be East Prussia … But I had been farther west. There the earth became Poland and was Poland, but it was nothing more; that is, this unheard-of condition of the earth (neither Russia nor Lithuania nor Germany nor Prussia nor Poland) also didn’t extend into the West. Or another explanation, more basic than the state: the regime. This territory was under a dual prohibition, that of the preserve and that of the frontier. Here was an unpoetic but realistic reason for its solitude, untrampled landscape, wild animals. But again—not for its incorporeality. I also found a more unexpected reason for this land so organic and harmonious: it was not so created by God, it turns out to have been so created by man. Here the notorious noosphere seemed most justifiable and noble. Man, on his own initiative, had planted forests on the Spit and loosed wild animals. Not even a century had passed since the origin of the Spit I was now admiring. This was hard to believe, so natural to the Spit was its current appearance. Feebly extrapolating, I tried to picture what it had been like without man—that is, without pines, birches, and blackberry bushes, without moose, roebuck, and boar: the inhuman wind furiously prowling the dunes, rolling them from place to place, blowing them eastward, straggly inhuman willow branches quivering in the wind, birds inhumanly flying over … There would be enough here for a ballad, a piercing ballad howling like the wind—but only one. The poet would wrap himself in his cloak, squint into the distance, and grit the sand in his teeth, whispering the great line, as expressive as the naked Spit—and then drive away in the same carriage, rolling up the blind and fastening it shut without a backward glance. The immortal poem had already seen all, with its own sighted lines … No, I hadn’t seen the Spit that way, and I didn’t mourn it. Grounds for pondering whether one is always right to mourn the departed. Not all waters have flowed away before our very eyes …

  But even this surprise, that the land was partly artificial—like the fact that it was not mine, like the fact that it was forbidden—still did not explain its peculiar incorporeality. There was yet another cause, finally and truly the last: this land was not land at all. A principled cartographer could have refrained from putting it on the map, or should have looked for a new symbol, neither land nor water, a kind of dotted line. The Spit did not meet the criteria by which we define dry land, or at any rate not the basic criterion from the standpoint of science, which believes criteria and not eyes. From that literal standpoint, the Spit was not land but sea. It was ocean floor, a hypertrophied sandbar thrusting itself above the water. A strict scientist would say that it was no more land than is the back of a whale that has surfaced from the water and will presently dive back down. He would smile condescendingly. The usual mistake—confusing human time with geological. From the standpoint of geology, the Spit has thrust itself temporarily above the surface of the World Ocean, for a time so brief that it is, indeed, more comparable with the whale back’s existence as dry land than with any geological epoch, even the most fleeting. It is a truly fleeting formation, this Spit—driven by the wind, it is drifting toward the mainland at a fabulous speed, tens of centimeters a year. Man tries to capture this geological instant: it is beautiful. He plants forests, designs a monstrous dam shielding the Spit from the sea. When he finally halts it, it will no longer be the Spit. It will be a dam.

  This did serve for an explanation. It turned the surprising into the convincing: there was nothing of the mainland here. That this was not mere suggestion—the special condition of the earth’s surface on the Spit—is proved not only by reverse logic, the inability to state causes and the primordial quality of surprise, but also by the following fact, which caught up with me even later: there is a mainland pimple embedded in the spiritual purity of the Spit. In its flight, the Spit has overtaken a small island and hasn’t yet left it behind. On this fragment of mainland amalgamated into the Spit you will feel a difference. Here other currents run through the earth, here everything, even the sky, is more banal, more carnal and malicious; here the fishermen have settled, gnarled people with stunted, gnarled dogs running around (apparently a special breed, under the constant influence of the wind). Here the air is different, the rains are different—this is land. And the local inhabitants really do seem to live as though on an island, they don’t think of the Spit as dry land. Almost disdainfully, if not fearfully, they squint at it from their kitchen gardens as though gazing into the distance, at the sea. An alien thing—not theirs.

  To the best of our knowledge, man is incapable of imagining anything that he hasn’t seen in some form or other. His mental images of hell are far more developed, differentiated, and detailed than his images of paradise. Moreover, hell is well populated, so to speak, with ourselves and our acquaintances. We seem to understand hell.

  We need only depict in cramped intimacy and simultaneity (on one canvas, let’s say) the things we have met in everyday experience—and the ghastly proximity of a saucepan, a rose, and a slug in the sink (my landlady’s charming little courtyard in the Crimea, where I am writing this page … ) will be suffused with hellish meaning. Nor have the birds flown from this narrative. In Bosch we are sure to meet both bird and fish; the most horrible thing is that the expression he gives the bird’s eye is not frightening, but always so curious and good-natured.

  Almost the main feature of Bosch’s hell is a complete inventory of the household objects and tradesmen’s tools of his time. They look so real, they must have been reproduced exactly. The unclean are building their tower with all the devices, and according to all the rules, of construction technology. The sinners are being heated in saucepans and skillets that must have been used by every housewife. Simply, these everyday objects and implements are many, all at once, in one glance. What scares us in Bosch’s hell is its similarity to life. The Promised Hell …

  Our vision of paradise is so meager and unattractive as to bring on the puckery taste of boredom: tabernacles … Having been on the Spit, and having encountered nothing else like it in my life, I think I can envision paradise with greater certainty. That world, too, is indistinguishable from ours, nothing we haven’t seen has been invented there, but much of what we’ve seen has been eliminated. That world is innocent and free, it is passionless, there is neither pain nor hope in it: it has been divested of our relationship to it: it exists, but in our absence, seemingly even in its own absence. Existence in that world is so astonishingly unburdened because we’re not there, and when we are, we’re no longer ourselves, as it were.

  I don’t know why the thought of death comes so easily in this paradise. Perhaps because paradise itself, after all, comes after death. Because death has already happened …

&nb
sp; From that day on, and every day, I walked away from my blocked typewriter and, just over the threshold, found myself in a place where I had nothing to write and no reason to write, because to see was enough. To see, and to thank fate for giving me eyes and for what my eyes had been given. I took several steps across the sand toward the sea, knowing that beyond the next small dune with its tousled hairdo of sedge I would see the water. This sense of expectation, although satisfied every time, was always just as keen: I walked halfway around the dune, a final, very strong gust of wind in the little gully seemed to hold me back, and suddenly I was standing on the shore and realizing, again, that the whole time, both up in the cabin with my typewriter and while I was walking, the sea had been roaring, and the roar had lured me out to see what was roaring: it was the sea roaring. I took exaggerated deep breaths and inevitably gazed into the distance.

  “Would that I could always gaze like this … ” That banal phrase conveys my preoccupation quite accurately: after the phrase came a sigh, and I was no longer gazing at the sea. I was occupied with the question: What sets the limit on enjoyment if there are no obstacles in its path? I didn’t have to hurry anywhere, there was nobody to hurry me. For less than half an hour, less than five minutes—I don’t think it was even a minute, more like half a minute, with the last seconds strained and artificial—I had squinted into the distance. Then I uttered that mental sigh, and all was over …

  When we turned back, I asked the doctor what he thought about this.

  “Forgive me for changing the subject … But we’ve walked and walked along the shore, completely absorbed in conversation, we’re absorbed in it even now, and yet for the last five minutes I’ve been wondering when we’d turn back. We’re not hungry or tired, and to all appearances we’re not bored or in a hurry; the shore is practically identical all the way, the terrain won’t change before tomorrow … Yet I was thinking: We’re going to turn back. What happened and what ended, that we turned back? What constant operates within us to determine our degree of satiation and the duration of our every action? Suppose there’s nothing to bind or obligate us … We can’t give a whole lifetime to the pleasant freedom of conversation. But imagine you’re in love, you’re walking with your sweetheart. Again, you’ll turn back. You’ll wait under the clock for thirty minutes or an hour, in the doorway all night—but not till the New Year. You part at dawn. Time for the young lady to go home. Mama, and all that. But she had the same mama an hour ago, you know, and it’s been time to part for many hours, yet at this precise moment for some reason the time has definitely come. The nightingale or the lark? After which exhortation—count them—does Romeo finally leave? Why not earlier or later? Why is it that I didn’t think about the time while we were walking, and I’m not thinking about it now, yet we’re already walking back? What thought made us turn?”

  “That one, I think, made us turn in the present instance,” said the doctor, who was precise in everything. My discussion was so unscientific that he ignored it. All he could talk to me about in this connection was the biological clock. But that was a different subject entirely … “You see, the biological clock is … ”

  I listened to him, and the thought troubling me now was this: What is the concern of science, and what is not? Couldn’t my question be studied with precision, calculated, explained? Which law, out of the many laws, does science pluck out for study?

  “The next one,” the doctor said.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “We look for the law that comes next, after the one we have discovered.”

  “Then don’t you think you’ll inevitably get sidetracked?”

  “Beg your pardon?” the doctor asked.

  “I mean, you begin to study a phenomenon, you discover a certain law, you feel your way from that one to another, from that one to the fifth, and so on. Haven’t you forgotten about the phenomenon you set out to study?”

  “Ah,” said the doctor. “No, we haven’t.”

  “Certainly not.” I grinned. “You study birds, you get interested in migrations. You study migrations, you get interested in the energy factor. You study … metabolism, is it? … and you focus on changes in the birds’ weight. You study fat in birds. By now you’re studying fat, don’t you think?”

  “But had we studied all this before?”

  “But does a bird have eyes? and wings? does a bird have a bird’s brain?”

  The doctor burst out laughing. “Tell me,” he said, “you weren’t ever a D student, were you?”

  “I was,” I said.

  So I would go down to the sea in order to find the doctor on the shore, if he had just gone down, or else he would follow me out, red-eyed from a sleepless night doing calculations. His numbers didn’t add up, my letters didn’t form words—without saying hello we would continue yesterday’s conversation.

  I lost all shame. I abandoned myself to the ambition of the nimble student. I asked him the questions I hadn’t asked as a young child. I might not get an answer, but I was delivered from my complex. All the questions without whose answers I had refused to understand anything further and received an “Unsatisfactory.” Does an insect feel pain? does a bird think? does a tree feel? do animals have a sense of humor? what happened to the intermediate evolutionary links; that is, why did man skip a rung on the ladder? has evolution stopped, and why? what do so many mosquitoes eat when I’m not here? can parasites be eliminated from the biological chain without harm? do birds have external sexual organs? And all these, quite quickly, came down to certain of the treacherous questions, which, in turn, came down to one: What is man?

  He had no answer to this question. Only oblique reservations.

  “In the sense you mean,” the doctor said at last, “there can be no answer. Man equals himself. He is incapable of more. God alone, if He existed, could know what man is.”

  “Are you sure He doesn’t exist?”

  “I don’t think He did.”

  I was about to open my mouth again when he said, “Let’s not speak of Him in vain. That commandment does not contradict science.”

  I am not very strong on useful information. All that he knew as a specialist, all the precise facts that I might have gleaned from him, flew in one ear and out the other. I’ve always been interested in how they put the jam into “pillow candies.”

  What I learned from him about his work could perfectly well fit on the flap of a dust jacket. “A little about a lot,” or “nothing about everything.” In New Zealand, it seems, they have a bird who during the mating season builds a house on the ground, with a door, and when courting the female he comes to the rendezvous with a flower in his beak. Or that birds have always known the earth was a sphere, they knew before people did, and yet when migrating they take the azimuth from the assumption that the earth is flat (perhaps I already have it mixed up). Or that birds don’t get sick.

  That last bit of information I experienced with somewhat greater emotion than the other entertaining bits. The assertion completely contradicted another one I had devoured the day before (naturally, I took everything on faith)—namely, that all birds are sick, there is no bird not sick.

  “It’s just an illusion that birds flutter around gaily,” Associate N. had told me with a tinge of melancholy. (She was returning from the traps, carrying a quivering catch, in a special flat box, with a net stretched across the top and a sleeve at the entrance.) “Overhead, they’re all feathers and cleanliness. Anyone who held them in his hand, as we do, would see that the poor things are swarming with parasites, covered with scabs and wounds.”

  These burdens behind the outward cloak of lightness (of course they’re light—they soar!) had evoked my trust and sympathy. The doctor clarified my bewilderment for me: That’s all external, and this is the truth: birds do not get sick in the same sense as other warm-blooded creatures, including us: they do not get sick with a temperature. It can’t go any higher. Now I fully understood those 108 degrees, a little of what I remembered from school. Birds
live at the limit (the price of flight). Their metabolism takes place at the limit of intensity possible for a warm-blooded creature. They are always at fever pitch and in a fever. Our slight fever of 100° is their 110°—that is, death. This is the sense in which birds do not get sick.

  I suddenly saw the true narrowness of life—which we all complain about with such vigor, precisely so that we won’t see its full extent. (Our difficulties are all temporary, we don’t want to see that they are the norm, that sometimes there is war, for example, when people do not get sick, almost like birds.) On this rarest of earths, where oxygen is diluted to exactly the proportion that we can breathe, where we have barely enough fresh water, even our bodv temperature is confined to an interval as narrow as a ray of light, where T° ≤ 108°. This entire space is divided and redivided into niches and geographic ranges, where, though we fly and gulp from morning to night, we have barely enough food to maintain these 108 (98.6) degrees, where getting too cold or too hot—like not getting enough to eat and drink—means death. All of this is close up and very real, all is crisscrossed and interconnected, so that if you had time to tear yourself away from the urgency of feeding, when you necessarily feel your existence is unique—if you had time to reflect, even then you couldn’t separate your own existence from the rest. Are you a separate body, or a part growing on a common one? You will never be able to say for sure.