by Andrei Bitov
But he was lured no further by my admiration. He stopped, like Alexander, having gone too far in his confidences. He fell silent and gazed into the distance.
The sea, toward evening, had become utterly calm and still. Lacquered. As if replete and thicker than water. For a long time now, although I spent hours wandering beside it every day, I had not been seeing it … In addition to box gales, there were also “bottle gales,” which cast up bottles and flasks from whiskeys and gins I had never seen or drunk. There were “amber gales,” which cast up a crumb of amber on their last wave. For a long time I had only been looking under my feet, in the hope of finding a piece of amber “as big as a child’s head,” or a whole canister, or at least a flat little flask, but I had stubbornly failed to find anything of the sort with which the lounge at the research station was crammed (once they had found a keg of wine, still good, and once a large jar of black caviar, unfortunately already spoiled), not realizing that an ancestor was guiding me in these quests, that this was my excursion into man’s prehistoric niche … I found a “chicken god,” a stone with a hole in it—my ancestor might have worn it to protect his chickens—and that was all. For a long time, it turned out, I hadn’t been seeing the sea, hadn’t been looking up, had been settling rather rapidly into my forefather’s niche. The evening sea turned a grayish pink, fading opalescently toward the horizon, and there it melted away, ran dry, in a line so gentle it was revealed only by the delicate sharp stroke that defined a tiny steamboat. The sun was setting, implausibly large and red. I couldn’t tear my eyes away … I did—and saw at last, right under my nose, a Swedish beer crate made of dark cerise plastic, with three unfaded gold crowns on it.
Inspired by the crate, I turned homeward. “So be it. Good,” I reasoned. “If gathering was the ecological niche of primitive man, and if he has abandoned that niche, made his way up the pyramid of life to the very top, expanded his geographic range to its utmost, and crowded out all the other biological species to settle all the territories of the earth, then what is his niche now, his geographic range? What can we designate as the ecological niche of modern man? The planet earth itself? Can we express it that way?”
“That’s somewhat tautological.” The doctor shrugged. “But yes. If you like.”
All this was reminiscent of an experiment with Lorenz’s fish … They construct their little houses in opposite corners of the same aquarium and draw the property line straight down the invisible mathematical middle. If one neighbor trespasses, even accidentally, the other fills with fury and chases the trespasser—out of his own territory, all across the trespasser’s territory, and into his house-cum-fortress. In his own home the cowardly trespasser gathers rightful energy and darts out, extremely agitated, to pursue his instantly timid rival all across the aquarium, driving him, in turn, back into his house. Once there, the rival gathers strength … And so on. The pendulum of war, set to swinging by the chance violation of a boundary, is damped remarkably slowly. The enemies keep this up for hours, until the same invisible boundary has been defined. Then, after halting on it for a moment, nose to nose, they separate as if nothing had happened, nibbling grains of sand and pretending that they have simply come out to graze on the borders of their properties … Thus we ourselves illustrated what we were talking about.
“Good,” I said, tightening my grip and continuing to drive the doctor homeward. “Then from another angle”—the beautiful crate slapped rhythmically against my knee—“we can discuss the earth as a single ecological system, as the ecological niche on earth of life itself … ” (The doctor had not objected so far.) “Can we say that by the moment when man appeared on earth the evolution of life, as it were, had also been completed?” (The doctor still said nothing … ) “By that moment, the earth as a whole was a perfect, well-developed, reliable, definitively balanced ecological system, where everything was interrelated, forming a closed cycle which in no way disturbed the precision of the overall balance of life or the feasibility of constantly renewing the earth’s resources, and in which primitive man, the gatherer, fitted harmoniously and without wrecking anything yet. Is that right? So far, I’m not contradicting?”
“Yourself or me?” the doctor said in a bored voice, as if waving me off with his fin.
“Logic.”
No, that was another breed of fish, another game: in order to take up residence in his house, I was driving him into my own. For this I had to begin by moving out …
“Man has abandoned his primitive niche, where he existed on an equal footing with the other species.” (By now I seemed to be saying this myself.) “Is it possible to say—this time not in the sense you reproached as tautological, but in a more adequate definition—that man’s ecological niche is precisely the ‘safety margin’ of the earth as the most general ecological system? That is, his niche is a certain interval in the earth’s existence, from the era of man the gatherer up to a world catastrophe that will result in the death of every thing alive? At the beginning of the century, there were one and a half billion of us. By the end, there will be six.
“Malthus again!” And again the sand gritted in the doctor’s teeth. “Space can’t be measured by time, as you are doing. Ecology studies only the ecological systems already extant. Only in this sense is it a science.”
“Man should feel somewhat awkward,” I said, as though the doctor and his ecology were to blame for all this, “if not ashamed: to be the crown of Creation, and understand this only as meaning that he was born to use Creation.”
“One doesn’t have to call our earth a creation. For the rest, however, I agree with you. There is a certain awkwardness. But we aren’t the only ones conscious of this nowadays, you know. There’s an obvious shift in awareness in this direction now—”
“You’re a scientist,” I said, bearing down. “A person who knows reality and assesses it soberly. Can you really believe that man is capable of stopping? So far, he’s just been gaining speed. Technical progress is a process, not a program. Man has long been a biological creature only in the three indisputable aspects you once mentioned to me. For the rest, he is no longer nature but her doom. Mankind is ruled by the laws of economics, not of biology. Even the conservation measures being undertaken now are economically disadvantageous, and I don’t think they’re any more effective, on the whole, than little old ladies from an English society for the preservation of animals—”
“You shouldn’t talk that way about little old ladies,” the doctor said. “Their work is nowhere near so trivial as you think.”
“Never mind,” I said sardonically, “the time may come for a society for the preservation of old ladies, too … Tell me honestly: which is more to your taste, a naked, icy earth over which the sun rises in vain, or … ” I threw a sidelong glance at the sea. The enormous sun, as it neared the horizon, had acquired an irregular pear shape. The smooth water looked like scarlet silk … I pitied the sun, although in my predictions it survived. “Or a green earth inhabited by birds and beasts, with rivers and lakes full of fish, with man gathering roots, and perhaps with the wise dolphin, who didn’t start down our unwise path?”
“I understand your anti-humanist thought,” the doctor said dryly. “Don’t say aloud the rest of what you meant to ask me. Yes, I used to ask myself the same question … ” The sun rolled faster and faster, like an apple, toward the horizon; it flattened out against the surface like a water drop; contrary to expectations, it failed to sizzle as it quickly slipped under, leaving on the water a unique gray light with a condensation of pink … “The question is devoid of meaning. Then there wouldn’t be anyone to look at this happiness—”
“Come, now!” I exclaimed. “You even say that? Surely everything alive on earth rejoices in life!”
“Yes, but only man is capable of appreciating its perfection in full measure—”
“But—”
“Don’t be too quick to drop the bomb you have in your heart. We don’t know everything. As for a hellish thought, even
an unspoken one, we don’t know what else is factored in with it, or what form it will develop. Just now I made a confession to which I had no right as a scientist … ” His faint smile still reflected the sunset.
Thus we reached agreement on the outlook for mankind, with no doubt that something depended on our decision. We groped for an exit from our own speculation. Sometimes it seemed to us … but every time, if we even came close to envisioning it as a reality, this path, too, would ripple and vanish into thin air. All measures were inadequate. Man positively refused to understand his true situation, for he was solely preoccupied with things that were immediately urgent, or seemed so to him. The present was breaking away from the future. Vanishing in this break was the dear past, the environment that had come to us by inheritance. We went so far as to set ecology up as a totalitarian government over mankind, where, in the medieval manner, a hand was chopped off for a chopped-off branch and a head was severed for the head of a jackrabbit. All this we did in the name of man … Only thus would they finally understand us! … “They” were everyone else but us. Upon sober assessment, our cabinet soon fell.
Dethroned, we returned home and climbed the dune. The sun popped up from the sea for an instant, only to plunge back down. The sand lay pink on the dune top. A long velvet shadow fell on the slope concavely, inside out. Night, awakening, was stirring in the gully between the dunes.
“I would never have believed that Malthus lived in the eighteenth century,” I sighed. “Carriages, groves, string quartets, gowns with trains … Air … what air they must have had then … Little streams babbling … the bumblebee buzzing … shepherds and shepherdesses, the reed … but he wrapped himself in his gloomy cloak and swayed in his carriage, thinking his black and distant thought, unbidden by anything around him … ”
“Don’t you think it’s strange,” the doctor said, “that we’ve spent the whole evening talking, right here in primeval nature, without meeting a single person—and what have we talked about?”
“Yes, what a place for it! We sin, we sin!” I laughed, grateful to him for that “we.” In my hand was the Swedish beer crate, attesting my intention to live.
Hardly had the sun made its final departure into the sea when opposite to it, on the gulf side, without waiting for dusk, the moon burst out from behind the sand dune—as if our two heavenly bodies were seesawing on the Spit, with their invisible plank laid right across it … The moon’s face was green. Goodness knows what she had seen, there at home, before coming out to us.
Probably it was she who made me toss and turn so, unable to sleep: her frightened light was beating in through all the cracks. I sat up and looked out the window. Small storm clouds were racing across the moon’s already melancholy brow. She disappeared for a second, hidden by a thick cloud, only to pop out with an even more venomous flush. “The moon went behind a cloud”—I repeated the tranquil phrase to myself and was seized with laughter. The moon never went behind any cloud! I mean, just picture where the cloud is, where I am, where the moon is. It would be hard to give a more laughable example of distorted scale! “The sun hid behind the hill … ” Why should it suddenly make me giggle like this? …
Now I saw the true self-sufficiency of the sun, which, if you please, “will send us its light,” “its fiery greeting.”{10} Hogwash, I thought. There’s no way the sun is concerned with that. It doesn’t send anything to us. It’s wholly concerned with itself. Little does it care what we are, what kind of dust drifting past … The single nail by which hung our whole earthly life began to wobble loose in my mind. Man’s arrogance and insolence were first fully expressed in language, if only in these simple forms. Man somehow feels that everything he uses is directly related to him. But that is truly laughable. “Nature’s storeroom,” “natural riches,” “the conquest of nature,” “black gold,” “white gold,” and whatever other kind of gold … I sorted through this fresh evidence of man’s banditry, all the prints his unwashed fingers had left in the language. I was lying on my back, and my face was grinning separately and complacently—flooded, if you please, with moonlight …
I was wakened by a heavy thunderclap splitting directly above me, practically in my own head. In the pitch dark, it was so sudden that I didn’t realize or remember where I was, what was happening to me—or even who I was. A living thing, capable of feeling fear and not wishing to die, had awakened in terror; it did not know that it was I. Following the crash and vibration, as if grabbing me by the throat, came a total, black silence, in which there was nothing but prolonged terror and strangulation. A blinding white light rang out, illuminating the matchbox in which I slept—and me, kneeling on all fours on the bed. I truly thought I saw my own self, my body, as if I had abandoned it, still a short distance away, in a quandary whether to return or not. Immediately afterward a blow slammed on the roof. The roof grunted, but strangely enough it held, yielding and moaning a little under the solid stream of water flooding down on it. In this swish and roar a new light rang out, this time reddish as it penetrated the layer of water coursing down the pane, and again everything stood still in utter blackness and the steady drone of the flood. Now the next thunderclap struck, so close that it seemed, again, to be inside my skull. I was wide-eyed awake, but that only increased my fright. And then the lightning began blazing and flaring with such frequency that from one flash to the next I never saw the light fade—my hut was enveloped in pink and white flame. By this light I could make out the map over my bed: all the little veins of rivers and railroads, and the little circles for cities. A flash—and I read the meaningless word “Amsterdam.”{11} No such city anymore, I thought indifferently, Holland is already washed away … I’m not sure whether I had any clear idea what might be happening—the deluge, a collision with a comet, an atomic bomb explosion, the atmosphere was tearing off, or I was going crazy—but one thing was clear to me: this was the end. “The living end!” I said aloud, to give myself courage, but gallows humor did not rescue me. I didn’t know what people usually did in a situation as unique as the end of the world. Again, one thing became clear to me: not for anything did I want to die right here, on this bed and in this cabin. Moaning with terror, still on all fours, I crawled off the bed and butted the door open with my forehead. This was right, to have crawled out on my hands and knees. The downpour was like a wall, and in any other posture I wouldn’t have been able to breathe. Out here it was even brighter than in the house, the water sparkled like cut glass. Because of the black trunks of the pine trees, I could tell where the light was coming from. Now I wouldn’t die in that house! One thing had been accomplished. But I didn’t want to die among these close little pines, either. I started to crawl toward the light, efficiently, aiming for open space. Swiftly, on all fours, I ran like an animal, leaving my new track in the wet sand. In this manner I made it to an open spot at the foot of the dunes. Ahead of me, over the gulf, rose a fiery, pulsing wall. It was red and yellow. A roar mightier than cannon fire enveloped me on all sides. I halted, spellbound by the spectacle of this dense, oscillating, thundering curtain. I had no more answers, I didn’t know what to do next, and I started to cry. I was choking on the downpour, but I imagined I was shedding that many tears. I did not want to die. And it wasn’t that I had such a great desire to live at this moment, or didn’t want to die in this manner—I didn’t want to die as this person. I was unprepared. In desperation I crawled slightly higher up the dune, as if dragging my bundle of tattered, unexpiated sins behind me like immovable property: the unwritten letter to my mother, the puppy I had never given my daughter, the shame of today’s verbosity … I don’t know why the sins I recalled were so few and innocent. I was sincerely ready to repent of everything. Most likely I wanted, unconsciously, to depart with a better opinion of myself. I had no intention of duping the Most High.
Greatest and most shameful, drowning out all these trivia, was the sin of my unreadiness to stand before Him. I lifted up to Him a bleating, wordless prayer and crossed myself. This astounded an
d even sobered me. I realized, with a sensation of certainty, that I had done it correctly. But before … I well remember that I had never really known how to cross myself: left to right? right to left? how to begin, vertically or horizontally? navel last or second? how many fingers to use? My attitude toward the church was the respectful one of a catechumen{12}—and yet I could never cross myself in church, not only because I didn’t seem to have sufficient excuse or reason to do so, but also because I didn’t properly know how. Trying to learn, I had cast sidelong glances at the people praying, but either they crossed themselves so small and so often, or … In sum, well remembering my perpetual puzzlement on this issue, I knelt at the foot of the dune, before the fiery wall as before the Coming, I was so childishly glad to have managed it all! And so adeptly did I genuflect, so devoutly did I cross myself, that my terror left me. Fear, the scourge of humanity, was washed from me by the water. And I don’t remember anything more …
I didn’t remember when I woke up, either. I walked out into the early morning. The sun was shining. Droplets sparkled on the twigs. Steam was rising from the grass. The bird kingdom was chirping even more furiously than usual. An ant was dragging a fly carcass. Associate N. was hauling cages down from the attic.
Everything was in its place—paradise, as before. Except that the sky seemed even bluer, the sand even yellower. Nevertheless, the morning struck me as insincere: it was pretending to be morning. I sought signs of betrayal and found none. The morning was pretending not to remember, mocking a jealous man. With a wry grin I tried to put up my fingers and cross myself the same way, correctly. My hand would not rise. As before, I didn’t remember how. Proverbially: “The peasant will not cross himself until the thunder sounds.” At least this joy had not betrayed me, the joy of being overwhelmed, yet again, by the exactitude of language. The somber doctor walked past me with a shaving brush in his hand, then came back.
