by Andrei Bitov
It replicated the record holder’s hand from within; these reverse dents were unrecognizable, a form unencountered in nature; it was like death. It was, indeed, a death mask, or rather the mask’s primordial form, from which the face bereft of life is later cast. The mask of a hand (a mask is also made from the hand of a great pianist … ). This death was warm, because it was wood. A rare wood, from a tree of rare hardness. Polished by the hand of a skilled craftsman, who had fashioned a one-of-a-kind stock for a unique hand. And then burnished by that unique hand, which had pulled the trigger hundreds of thousands of times. There was no trigger, no barrel. It was empty as a skull. I warmed it in my own hand—this was like a handshake. (Experiencing this sensation for the first time, I had no way of knowing that I would relive it within twenty-four hours … )
He had never killed anything but those little ducks. He hated hunting and fishing. But if there was anything he would have shot dead without hesitation, point-blank, it was that bloodsucker … As a marksman and a philosopher, he knew what murder was and hated murderers … Beria he would have hit from any distance. In the eye. That would even have been easier—the pince-nez would have glittered, he would have aimed at that patch of light. From two kilometers, two miles …
“Miles?” The Englishman woke up. “You have Russian miles?”
“Don’t vorryr,” Marxen reassured him. He had just begun to study English. His mix of Jewish, Georgian, and Abkhazian blood made him an internationalist, not merely a hater of executioners.
Carrying on with the choice of a location, we turned away from the sea at last, in the filmmakers’ van and the two cars (the mafioso’s and the monkey researcher’s), and began to climb upward along a river by the name of Water. Something reminded me of something. Wasn’t it here that Father and I had caught trout and grayling in the winter of ’54, when he was building his sanatorium in Sochi? He fished, and I wandered. This was his pedagogical measure—taking me along to the construction site—and my first exile. They were separating me from my first woman, who had been deemed “unsuitable” at a closed-door family council. I kept writing letters, running to the Claim Window in secret, and receiving no answer. I pacified my flesh with ceaseless bodybuilding, my biceps grew two and a half centimeters. My poor father! He, too, it turned out, was pacifying his flesh by fishing; who could have thought it … A man past fifty! (Fifty-two.) At the Claim Window I finally received a letter addressed to him, and read it … Papa, I couldn’t give it to you open! And when, embarrassed, straying among subordinate clauses, you nevertheless asked me straight out whether I hadn’t received by mistake a letter that wasn’t mine, I flatly denied it. A quarter-century later, when I was helping you take a bath and almost sobbing over your feeble absence-of-body with its expanding birthmarks, you kept your underpants on, explaining (what words you found!) that a son shall not see his father’s shame. What Bible had you read?! We never had one at home in my lifetime. We did, of course, have conversations about churls.
“Don’t teach your father to fuck,” I heard. “This is it.”
We braked.
Back then I had seen this house … With a mansard, incidentally. Beyond the shrubbery, beyond the plane trees, beyond the lawn, it stands vacant, but as if the vacationers had only just moved out, just now. The house in which the little boy Lavrenty grew up. Right in this thick shrubbery, perhaps, the future Beria screwed his first kitten. She wouldn’t put out, she scratched him. And he killed her. Like the priest in the nonsense rhyme. But in the rhyme the priest killed his dog. So he killed him, too, killed the priest. Killed him because they’d eaten a piece of his meat. Even though it was the dog. But he hardly killed the priest for killing the dog. More likely for having her. Especially because he loved—
“He loved her—”
“How could that vampire love anyone!”
“I know the true story on that,” the director insisted. “I was personally acquainted with her. He saw her through his binoculars from his mansion on Moscow’s Garden Ring. She was walking home from school. She already had round calves, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them.”
“ ‘Rather skinny, but her calves were round … ’ ”{40} Who had quoted this? Daur, of course. “ ‘Lately she’s become a priestess … ’ ” He was spouting “Letters to a Roman Friend,” by heart. “ ‘A priestess, and converses with the gods … ’ ”
“Who wrote that?” the director asked, startled.
“Sounds like Joseph,” the Englishman remarked.
“Well, he may have heard this story,” I replied, on the strength of my personal acquaintance with the poet. “He’s always been concerned with such things.”
“There’s a sea of scandal here … ”
“A Black Sea?”
We were reclining on the lawn near Beria’s house and admiring the open view: on the left the mountains reached upward, on the right the valley broadened downward, implying the sea …
The champagne, however, had run out, and the Englishman was limp with exhaustion.
“But when are the monkeys?” He was pushing to continue the journey.
“Tomorrow. Everything will be tomorrow,” the researcher explained to him. “Both the monkeys and tomorrow … ”
Anyhow, HE had been right about the bubblies: champagne tires you out. The Englishman was sound asleep, but the others, too, kept dozing off. Except the mafioso and Daur, who were having a conversation behind me in Abkhazian. I listened: about those same “Abuzinians.” I listened: Abkhazian is the most mysterious language! It’s the swish of a dragon against a rock. From a time when dragons still existed … “I see a world blanketed with institutes of Abkhazian studies,” Mandelstam said. Sound is more ancient than speech. The sounds of Abkhazian speech seem to flow together, not into words, but into just one word, however long you like, equal to the length of the whole spoken sentence. As though landscape and action and character and time of action were not divided into subject, predicate, modifier, and object but were all contained in a single word, born anew each time. That is, reality isn’t stratified, it’s included in the word. The reason no one knows the Abkhazian language, not even the Abkhaz themselves, is that you have to inhale it along with reality from the day you are born. So natural was it for these men today to speak Abkhazian that I could immediately conclude they were both from the village, they had been born there and grown up there. It’s hard to believe the language is dying as long as even two people speak it the way Daur and the mafioso do. “Abuzinian” was not a word but a syllable in one or another long word—a word as long as they had breath for. This syllable that I had singled out kept shifting places in the word/sentence, standing now at the beginning, now at the end, now in the middle. The mafioso’s tone was resolute on the “Abuzinians,” while Daur was trying to mollify him. Or so I understood. By now I very much wanted to ask about these cutthroat Abuzinians. What did they want, and what hadn’t they shared? But everyone except me seemed to know this so well that I felt childishly afraid to ask, lest I lose my “in” status, so flattering and not granted to everyone.
“Is it already tomorrow?” The Englishman was awake.
“It’s still yesterday,” we answered wittily.
“Yesterday I still have a bottle of whiskey,” he replied.
Properly appreciating his sense of humor, we followed him to his hotel.
“No ice,” the Englishman said apologetically, fetching a threesided bottle with a turkey on it.
“He says there are no glasses,” Daur translated.
“Nyet problem,” said the mafioso, not suspecting that he was translating from English.
Perhaps-Aslan was already bringing glasses.
We discussed, in passing, the subject of ethnic humor. Marxen, evidently wrestling with his own three nationalities, declared that there could be no national sense of humor.
“What’s Abkhazian, Georgian, Russian humor? Is it funny or not funny—that’s humor.”
“Funny to some, but not funny to oth
ers.”
“That is, funny to a Russian, let’s say, but not very to a German?”
“Or funny to a German, but not funny at all to a Russian—”
“Or funny to a Georgian, but not to an Abkhaz—”
“It won’t be funny at all to an Abkhaz if it’s funny to a Georgian.”
“Jewish humor strikes everyone funny—”
“If it’s really Jewish,” Marxen said.
“You mean the Russians invent those jokes themselves? That wouldn’t be so funny.”
“What do you have against the Russians?”
“Me? Never. Serozh, is there Armenian humor?”
Serozh considered for a long time and then took offense: “What are you, thinking of those Armenian Radio jokes again? That’s not Armenian humor.”
“All right, if the Armenians didn’t invent the Armenian jokes, or the Jews the Jewish jokes—or the Chukchi, certainly, the Chukchi jokes{41}—then who did?”
“Is English humor also not English?”
“I concur with the view that this is rather a question of import than export,” the Englishman said.
We burst out laughing, and the Englishman didn’t understand why.
“Something else strikes me funny,” he said, gesturing at what to our eye was his luxurious hotel room. “There’s so much wood in Russia … ”
We followed his hand, as if he were showing us a grove.
The whole room really was paneled in wood, or rather, an imported plywood imitation of wood, more likely Finnish than Russian.
“And look, I can’t understand it … So much wood—and not one wardrobe. Nowhere to put clothes,” he added, reverting to English.
Our jackets were piled in the middle of his careless bed, on which we were also sitting.
“It’s perfectly understandable,” we said.
“Why??”
“They didn’t budget enough.”
“Of what, of what?” the Englishman said, with a perfect Voronezh accent.
“Well, economic resources. Money.”
“Enough for wood, but not for a wardrobe?”
He began to circle the room, thumping the walls. They responded with the sound of cannon fire. “Why so much?!”
“Funds.”
“Funds? You mean your Plan? That they sent you more plywood than money? But extra plywood is money, to you!”
We laughed again, and the Englishman couldn’t understand why. How could we explain that it wasn’t because of his failure to understand our economy? It was because “plywood,” in Russian slang, does indeed mean money.
“Plywood is cabbage,” someone tried to explain, but this was an infelicitous translation.
“Plywood is plywood … ”
The translation had been made more precise, and, as if in proof of its supreme precision, all of a sudden the plywood exploded boomingly—fired a shot and fell silent.
“What’s that, what’s that!” The Englishman jumped up in fright, pointing at the ceiling. Something ran across it again, making a scrabbly racket. We were not about to explain to him that this was a rat, and perhaps also a cat. We said, “A mouse.” We weren’t about to shame the state.
“Then why such low ceilings?”
“They didn’t have enough plywood.”
“Meaning money?”
“No, meaning plywood.”
“Is this Russian humor?”
“No, economics. They made money on the plywood.”
“That is, plywood on the plywood?”
“You’re quick on the uptake. But you, unlike us, know what a third-category city is … ”
“Ah, Voronezh! … ” The Englishman rolled his eyes dreamily. We drank to Voronezh. You must agree, this brings our vast expanses together, when an Englishman drinks to Voronezh in Sukhum. It unites the empire.
“Let’s call it experience,” the Englishman said, in English. So this was the story. The Englishman had come to the Soviet Union to gather material for his diploma. (We never did clarify which was the diploma and which the dissertation: what we call a dissertation, they call a diploma—or vice versa.) He had come to study our experiment, because in Britain they had something similar. An experiment in keeping monkeys in uncongenial climatic zones under almost congenial natural conditions. In other words, free. He had heard a lot about the monkey colony in Sukhum and felt that this might be where he could garner some experience. But he was told that such an experience was common not only in Sukhum but also throughout the Union, and that monkey breeding was now a practice, not an experience (apparently, as the Englishman realized in Voronezh, they were confusing the concepts of “experience” and “experiment”). Apparently they also confused “practice” with “practicum” and thus sent him to a student practicum in Voronezh, where an experiment had once been set up, “reahlly,” with monkeys living under conditions approximating those in Voronezh, but the monkeys had died in a week, so that there may have been an experiment, but in practice there had been no experience, as he promptly reported to Moscow, with the request that he be transferred to Sukhum after all. He reported and reported, all the while living in a student dormitory (oh, you don’t know what this means in a third-category city!), until the period of his on-the-job training was up, and then he decided simply to test whether there was such a place as Sukhum, as on the map, and he reached it “on his own expenses”—that is, at his own expense, another project for which it was none too easy to obtain permission, so he had succeeded only through Intourist, as a private party, and now he had met Mr. Dragamashchenka (this, it turned out, was the researcher’s name—so we had a Ukrainian in our company, too), and lo and behold Sukhum “reahlly” existed, and Mr. Dragamashchenka had promised he would try to do everything possible … but this was the third day they’d been meeting, and he couldn’t pay for the hotel this long, it was supposed to be five stars but there was no wardrobe …
Anti-Aslan said that five stars were coming right up, and before another rat had time to run across the ceiling he appeared with a bottle of cognac. The Englishman kept counting the stars on the bottle, half laughing and half crying.
“Sleep, sleep, sleep!” the Englishman proclaimed. “You’ve buggered me to death. Sleep is the shortest distance between two binges.”
The director and the mafioso were no longer there.
Mr. Dragamashchenka took my elbow and led me aside. “Would you be able to help me out?”
You can see, he said, what condition he’s in … (“No more. To sleep,” the Englishman was muttering.) On Fridays we have meetings with interesting people. Oh, a small group of research associates get together. A relaxed conversation … You can talk on anything you like … They know you well, he said with conviction, from which I inferred that he himself had never heard of me before. This did not wound me, however (or had I trained myself not to feel wounded?). After the meeting there would be a light tea, right there in the laboratory …
Tea, of course, altered the matter. That was pretty good, tea out of retorts and test tubes. HE was pushing me to consent. You yourself see the condition he’s … it’s embarrassing. A foreigner, after all … But you won’t be embarrassed by a fellow countryman? In a fellow countryman we understand it, and besides, you’re doing fine …
Doing fine … Friday … I had thought it was Thursday. I could be proud of myself. Wasn’t I every inch an “interesting person”? Today, at least, I was a very interesting person. Who here knew that HE (I thought of myself in the third person) had just finished something great! For me it was still Wednesday, when I had finally, after trying for a month, sat down at the typewriter … I had thought it was one night. It was two, as it turned out. Oh, this was a sign! This inspired hope. I still hadn’t read whatever I’d written there, but since I didn’t remember, it might actually be a text. I remembered that the last thing I had described was the yard—and I had walked out into it.
And walked out of it. Today I could be proud of HIM, too. No small matter, was it—two n
ights without sleep (I might have curled up for three hours or so, but in that same henhouse, without undressing, like a chick on a roost), forty pages of continuous text, approximately two half liters already, not counting the champagne that I myself had drunk … It’s not everyone who could, not everyone who would …
But today was Friday already. And only noon. Yesterday had whistled past me like a bullet past my temple. We—what was left of the cohort, Marxen, Daur, and I—were riding in Research Associate Dragamashchenka’s car. The responsibility I faced had utterly sobered me, and something had become clear. Complications had arisen with the Englishman. It was embarrassing to refuse him, you understand, but the road to the site of the monkey settlement lay past a “facility.” What kind of facility this was the researcher didn’t tell even me, but I understood that the Englishman was not to see the monkeys. For me, however, the researcher said, meaning me, it could be arranged if I was interested. They couldn’t pay me for my talk, but this they could do. Even tomorrow, they would take the institute bus and go, and while they were at it they would check on how the preparations for winter were coming, winter’s the main problem for monkeys. Last winter was tough, lots of snow, they had trouble getting through, it went down to twenty-five below in the mountains where the monkeys were and their tails got frostbitten, but otherwise they survived, and if they survived that winter, they’ll survive the next ones, too, except of course they need support, they have the little house against bad weather, and they do need extra food, but still they’re free, in effect … But you’ll see for yourself. Are they better off free? No question—if you could just get a look at these beauties! What manes! These are lions, not monkeys … The presence of lively emotion in the discourse of the monkey researcher, as he had proved to be, gladdened me. Down at the bottom of my nearly emptied authorial womb something began to stir, rapidly swelling and bulging in the likeness of an idea. Soviet monkeys … The liberation of the monkey … The Russian monkey … A monkey living free, under conditions of socialist society … Without a cage … Monkey freedom … A republic of monkeys … Monkey ASSR … Couldn’t say that—everyone would be offended. The monkeys would not be offended. The main thing was not to offend the little monkeys. I would allow no harm to come to them.—No, I could write this, I had to! “We gave them their freedom … their manes grew, but their tails got frostbitten … they need feeding … ” There was something to this! I always get pregnant the first time … But then I can’t deliver for years. The fruits of my womb press down upon each other. The mass begins to ferment. It no longer results in wine—I have to distill moonshine.
