The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  At the back of the empty dark hall, the probable future store, stood some sawhorses. On these, Pavel Petrovich—and again very cozily!—laid out our property. The worker (I don’t want to call that noble man a laborer) sparkled in the doorway, the only light for the entire premises, and we silently drank our first glass and silently waited for the quite rapidly arriving renewal of our constitutions, and I began to feel good, good again, good all over again, and it seemed to me that the worker was defending us, shooting back at a world that was bad and hostile to us.

  “If you want, I’ll tell you quite honestly,” Pavel Petrovich said, and gave me a look so sad that I didn’t understand it.

  But I felt so indulgent toward him, in view of the nobility of our worker, our protector, our machine gunner … that I no longer seemed to remember (though in fact I did remember) his nocturnal treachery, I felt indulgent and didn’t want to hear his excuses, his humiliating lies, and I said, admiring my worker, “Why didn’t you offer any to him? Well?”

  “He won’t have any,” Pavel Petrovich answered lucidly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he will at lunch break.”

  “You know him?”

  “How could I? I’ve never seen him before. So, do you want me to tell you?”

  “Well?” I asked crossly. I still hadn’t recovered from my heroic behavior at the police station.

  “In all honesty, I turned chicken. That’s why I abandoned you. Now you won’t want me to be your godfather.”

  No, I didn’t know this man yet! He was utterly unable to accept the idea that he had betrayed me. No, he hadn’t betrayed me. He’d had no choice, it seemed. Owing to a number of circumstances, which he would someday tell me about, he had no right to take the risk. On the other hand, I must understand that I was with him for life and should rely on him as on myself. But if I knew the whole story, if I had any idea what he’d had to suffer in his lifetime …

  What was this power he had seized, if only over me alone?

  … Unlikely that I was alone … I had traipsed along after him again like Gogol’s Mizhuev.{27}

  What I never succeeded in grasping, and what indisputably got me into trouble, was this: the interval and the dose. That is, I couldn’t grasp the law or rhythm by which he varied it: now half a glass, now a full one, now one-third full, sometimes after five minutes, sometimes after an hour. I couldn’t swear to the accuracy of the interval, of course, because I scarcely had any sense of time left. But in his implacable, suicidal drunkenness there was some element of power over himself and over the process, and although it was a total mystery how I maintained my equality with him, every time he found it necessary to add or repeat I proved quite able and sometimes even willing to endure it. Both his tale and its stormy whitecaps of ideas, presaging the assault of yet another world system, were somehow subordinated and organized by the seeming systemlessness of his toasts. For he did keep his hand on that arrhythmic pulse! This was hard to believe, and all the harder to formalize as a thought, but he seemed to be drinking through me, not himself, and it wasn’t that I was submitting to his desire to keep on, but rather that he was being guided at first by my capabilities, and later also by my potentialities. The dreadful stories of his sympathetic, horrific life were fitted in between these spatially and temporally unequal drinks … The fascists set fire to his house; sheep bleated; the flag fluttered over the village soviet; the tractor crushed a drunk in a rut; one night a boar appeared in the headlights of the Studebaker; not until a week later were they found, starving in a cellar and unable to remember the word “mama”; his brother escaped from the juvenile colony but proved to be the “cow”—his fellow escapees ate him fifty kilometers from Ulan-Ude; they found a child’s finger in a meat pie at the station lunch counter; his father raped his little sister in a furrow … This was a TV soap opera, with all roles played by him. But I did not doubt. Occasionally my feeble mind attempted to calculate the hero’s age and was confounded, just as in my attempts to calculate the quantity he had drunk. My companion and contemporary had lived several lives, sometimes reaching age seventy and age seven simultaneously. The events he had participated in, or sometimes merely witnessed, were historical, but then his role and perspective would become fantastic, and, in a complete reversal, the persuasiveness and concreteness of the facts of his personal life would paint the historical fact in the most phantasmagoric colors. But each of these biographical motifs always had the same underlying thought: betrayal. Every time, he was unjustly, illegally, accidentally, intentionally, through no will of his own, et cetera, banished, seized, resettled, imprisoned, punished, humiliated, trampled—at the university, in the army, in the orchestra, in the work brigade, in kindergarten, in the Academy of the Arts—his highroad, his bright path, his calling, his purpose was blocked and cut short. Every time, he was betrayed. And however unreproachful I was as his listener, however poorly I understood, I could not be fully unaware of the link between this endless chain of treacheries and the fact that he had taken to his heels last night and I had been arrested. My sympathy for his misadventures and my belief in the truth of the events was inconvenient for him, because the more he talked, the harder he tried to justify himself. And the more I agreed with him, the tighter he drew his own noose. This was not intentional on my part, and the fact that I was rising in his estimation and towering ever higher must have exasperated him.

  “You, too, shall betray me,” he said at last, softly and over-poweringly, as though leaning toward Judas at supper.

  I made no answer, in the first place because I couldn’t, and in the second place—

  “In the first place is enough,” he interrupted my silence. “That’s what Napoleon said.”

  Judas, I think, also remained silent … And really, the Kavkaz was all gone. Here, from the darkness, the doorway shone as brightly and the day beyond it was as sunny as though there were sky, not street, just outside the door. That doorway beckoned. The welding sparks, which had seemed so blinding when we entered, now showered whitely in the sunlight. The worker, silent as ever, stepped aside to let us pass.

  And there we were, in the sunlight. My sensitivity was like that of a photographic plate. I tried to hide in my own sleeve and wasn’t fully successful—the light leaked in around my edges. Pavel Petrovich, saddened by my coming betrayal, no longer spoke of the future, not even the near future. But already we were going “somewhere.” A police officer’s glance would linger on us, he would consider and assess and let us pass to the next officer. He let us pass in the same way that we passed the glass, in that same unclear rhythm. From this point on I don’t remember very well … All we talked about now was Russia. A most relentless, most forgettable conversation.

  But we were making stubborn progress. Across Russia, at least. Again we were “eagerly awaited” somewhere, it seemed. We were even going to his home, it seemed. He did, it turned out, have a home. And a family. And a wife. She, too, was eagerly awaiting us. But how far it was! Up seven hills, down seven dales … On each of the hills a bottle was procured, and in each of the vales it was drunk.

  I discovered myself now there, now here. Probably I was somewhere between here and there. “Here” was a green little courtyard amidst Khrushchevian five-story buildings arrayed in a square. A green little courtyard with trees that had reached adolescence in the so-soon-over historical epoch but were not yet fully grown. They stuck up around the playground along with the mushroom sunshades, the sandboxes, and the rocket shaped like a slide, and this made them look like kept-back, overgrown children, just coming home from school to our own era—they had skipped out on the last song. They had outgrown the school uniform, too. In the shade of one of these schoolgirls with knees, in the shade of a maidenly poplar, on a small domino table, after killing a bottle with some gamblers and running out to get another and killing that one, too, we played at a roulette wheel fashioned from a laundry tub belonging to a certain Georgie … There, under the sun’s mild and caressing ra
ys, I lost all five of my remaining rubles. Pavel Petrovich won them back, after producing, with a sigh, the “three rublee,” as he called them, that he had stashed away out of his “dog money” … “Seven rubles devote to the purchase of boats, and the last three rublee … ” Pavel Petrovich declaimed, betting on both red and odd at once, winning on both, and promptly losing everything on zero.

  Our losses took us to new distances and led for some reason to a sporting-goods warehouse, which was closed, moreover, for stocktaking. But this was the very place where they really were “awaiting” us. Here, too, Pavel Petrovich was completely accepted and even needed. They greeted him gladly, paid no attention to me. An aging playboy took us into his small office, where Pavel Petrovich unwrapped a newspaper containing something like a miniature book (he had had it with him, apparently, all through our arduous journey—and had not forgotten it, dropped it, or lost it). This miniature book was none other than a freshened panel from Simyon, with the same St. Cyril and St. Methodius as yesterday. Now they shone affectionately and soberly below a Japanese calendar with a Japanese nude, whose artful pose concealed a certain shortness of leg but did not conceal the rest of her. On a gym horse the generous playboy set an elegant table for us, with caviar even. He was setting out bread and it fell off the awkward surface of the horse, I lurched to pick it up, and he waved a hand: Leave it be. But Pavel Petrovich—he tremblingly picked it up and kissed it, saying, “Forgive us, dear bread.” Although the dear bread had caviar on it. And when we had seated ourselves on a heap of exercise mats among the skis and rapiers and inhaled the wondrous smell of wood and resin, we recovered ourselves a little. I began to feel cheerful among these clumsy athletic monsters, fabricated by the disciplined workers of certain cooperatives resettled beyond our realm of consciousness—by juvenile delinquents, aged actors, the blind, and other outcastes! Cheerful, and suddenly weepy. And I did weep, hugging the sturdy leg of a vaulting buck remembered from my school days. The kind manager sympathized, very solicitously and tactfully. Comforted, I left with Pavel Petrovich for our next destination, which, as he averred, was just a stone’s throw away.

  Our stone’s throw began in a now wild apple orchard preceding the city’s farthest new development. The buildings sparkled in the rays of the setting sun like a spilled box of sugar lumps, overwhelming the remnants of my consciousness with the purity and inaccessibility of the universal creative life. And the orchard, through which we were already walking, was extraordinarily large and beautiful, with its sparse, regular, soldierly array of squat and gnarled trees, each with one gnarled, speckled apple surviving in its branches. We ate the apples as we drank. Here in the thick grass, among the trees, on a beautiful gentle slope, within sight of the house where we were “eagerly awaited,” we made our last stop. This was truly a dale, a valley, dividing the next-to-last city district from the last. We no longer had any strength left. We were near our goal. A kind of termination, full of sorrow and happiness, shone in the sunset air that stagnated among the apple trees. Here was the threshold of paradise, the last hesitation line before … who knew what. We had come to the end. We drank, and my mind cleared as never before in my life. This was all Pavel Petrovich had been waiting for. As though he had been leading me to this very point for two days, deliberately and unswervingly.

  “Now I will tell you what it would have been premature to tell you earlier,” Pavel Petrovich said, bright sorrow in his eyes. He laid his hand on my shoulder, the way men doubtless used to lay the sword when initiating a knight.

  I was fully conscious of the supreme responsibility of this initiation …

  “Everything was finished by the time man arrived. Adjusted and wound like a clock. Man arrived in a ready-made world. There was no evolution after man. Evolution continued only in his own consciousness, repeated itself in his comprehension … But man confused comprehending with possessing, with belonging to him! The world was created by an artist, to be contemplated and understood and loved by man. But why ‘in His image and likeness’? If you have some acquaintance with men, there’s no way to understand that. The only way you can understand it is: ‘in His image and likeness’ so that man, too, would be an artist, capable of appreciating. The artist needed another artist. An artist can’t exist alone. The Creator needed Adam even worse than Adam needed Eve. What is Creation, what is this ready-made world? Only in the artist will you find, if not an answer, then a response, if not love, then pity. I weep with pity when I see an ordinary great painting, never mind Creation. For behind our every ecstasy lurks a sense of doom: we will sell, betray, dissipate, violate, waste! But no, surely we exaggerate ourselves even here. And only the Indians of the Yamana tribe have arrived at this idea—”

  “What, what?” I said with a start. “Which Indians?”

  “The last Yamana Indian,” Pavel Petrovich continued, sorrowfully and solemnly, “died in the Argentine city of Ushuaia in 1962. Tierra del Fuego was the homeland of the tribe. In the middle of the last century, they numbered three thousand people. They had no political organization, the elder’s word was law. That is, from our standpoint they were extremely low on the ladder of civilization. Low even in stature, only five feet. And they lived in huts roofed with grass or sheepskins. Yet they had a highly developed language, divided into a great many dialects, a fact which made the work of the ethnographers especially difficult. So nothing remained of them. Not a word, let alone a dialect. Only it happened that before the death of the last Yamana a doctor from the hospital in which he lay had tape-recorded him after all. The Yamana was delirious and talked ceaselessly in his haste to reveal something. The story of that tape is a whole detective novel. The tape disappeared. Later it was miraculously found, in Australia. But that’s beside the point. Along with episodes from the great tribe’s history, when they deciphered the tape they found a noteworthy Creation myth, which for the first time, I believe, treats our Creator as an artist. When the great god Nikibumatva, as I think he was called, which in translation means ‘he who shepherds the clouds,’ undertook to create a picture of life, his shadow and devil—Escheguki, I think, which in translation means ‘the dank name of the trackless being’—immediately meddled in his work. Nikibumatva knew how to create a form. Escheguki was jealous and tried to equal him in everything, but he didn’t know how to create a form and was very afraid of revealing this. Watching closely how Nikibumatva created a form, Escheguki would try to copy it, but even his copies came out ugly and warped. Then he began to pretend that he was mocking Nikibumatva, making things this ugly on purpose to show the absurdity of whatever the great god might undertake. Nikibumatva, being truly great, paid no attention, although Escheguki did his best to vex him. Nikibumatva, for example, created the form of a fish. He made many fish, until he arrived at a perfect dolphin. Escheguki, spying on his work and copying it without talent, made a corrupt form and kept adding fragments of other, incompatible creatures, which had also been perfectly created by Nikibumatva, and when he finally gave up in exhaustion, he had the crocodile. The great god created the songbird, Escheguki the bat. Nikibumatva the butterfly, Escheguki the dirty housefly. Nikibumatva would manage to make ten beautiful animals—Escheguki would corrupt them all and glue them together as one, with his poison saliva. But even Escheguki, despite his enviousness and lack of talent, learned a lot, because his secret desire was not to ridicule Nikibumatva but rather to be his equal. And now, when the great god made the noble wolf, Escheguki tried for an especially long time, but his result was the jackal. And Escheguki despaired, and Escheguki was wroth, and he contrived a gruesome joke. He began to sculpt a creature in the likeness of the great Nikibumatva, and his result was—the monkey. The great god had endured all, just so that he wouldn’t be distracted from his great work, but this he could not bear. And yet, since he couldn’t meddle with someone else’s creation, even an ugly one, and since he couldn’t prevent something already alive from living—he had neither destroyed the crocodiles, bats, and jackals nor corrected them, onc
e they existed—so, too, he made no move to correct the monkey, this caricature of himself, but merely sprinkled on him a teardrop of his vexation and a bead of his own sweat, for he was distracted from his work for an instant and wiped away the tear and the sweat with his tired hand. And the two drops scalded the monkey, for they fell right in his eyes. Something began to happen to the monkey. He himself began to change, before the very eyes of his creator Escheguki. Trying in every way to imitate and resemble Nikibumatva, the monkey changed and became a man. What had created him was the teardrop and sweat of the great god, and that is why love and work became man’s fate: love sees the form, and work creates it. But that is also why man turned out to be merely ‘in His image and likeness,’ because the great god had no intention of copying himself, for he was a true creator, a far cry from the untalented parodist and caricaturist Escheguki. That is why, to this day, man is two-sided—he was created by the devil, but inspirited by God. He might have become like God in every respect, but he is prevented by his devilish nature, which he struggles against but does not conquer, because his flesh is from the devil, but his spirit is from God.”

  Pavel Petrovich lapsed into a solemn silence. He filled the glass but neither drank it nor offered it to me, and fell to thinking again for a long time, like the great Nikibumatva, while I remained silent like the monkey he had inspirited, sitting at his feet and gazing up at him in adoration. Now he drained the glass at one gulp.

  “You know what I understand, thanks to this myth?” he said. Now he filled the glass and handed it to me (I forgot to mention, we had only the one). “I finally understand the first sentence in the Bible—”