by Andrei Bitov
She was leaving. HE managed—scoundrel!—to kiss her hand. Otherwise she would have stuck it back in her mitten.
She forgot her book—or was it my brother’s? The Tin Fleece of Victory.{64} A translation from the Georgian.
People do write!
The narrative rolled along in flowing, Nobelesque waves. It licked the shore of Colchis. A small, weary detachment, the last remnant of a mighty army. At its head Jason, wearing a “cloak with a raspberry-red lining,” no less. Behind him the man who executes every order in silence, as though his tongue had been cut out in captivity. And behind him, the man who does nothing but scratch himself—the “gallinippers” try his patience. Everyone in turn shivers with malaria. Jason alone is smooth-shaven, reflected in his own shield. Another limps at the end—his short and double-edged sword has chafed his neck, and his “loincloth is festering”. And now the mute utters his first word. “The Pontus,” he says. Short-and-Double-Edged washes his wound in sea water. They build a campfire. Gleams of firelight play in their sunken eyes. The gallinipper victim scratches his broad Ossetian chest. Sparks fly up without reaching the stars, under which inscrutable Hellas sleeps peacefully, forgetting her heroes. From the page came a whiff of the campfire, and my nostrils flared in helpless envy of this ancient-Georgian Greek.
I made haste to be saved before my time was up … I made haste to be baptized. That was the thing! Forty years I had waited, like a Grand Prince{65}—but I made haste. And did not die then and there. But how could I die. … The Eye had not died when they beat him, as a child, on the “plywood” (his chest) with a “bunk” (a rod from the head of an iron bed) … How could I die, when I was barely forty, in this most beautiful place on earth … except perhaps from happiness. The Motsameta Monastery, whose name, I learned, means “the believers,” stood on a kilometer-high precipice above the Kura,{66} and from the precipice one celebrated that kind of world, and a landscape also arrayed by autumn. The farther away, the clearer the air: at the bottom of it, on the bank of the floodplain, people had indeed gathered to celebrate Sunday, they were starting the shish kebab and laying out lavash and greens, and a happy cow who had sneaked up and stolen a lavash was running circles around the meadow like a dog, fleeing her pursuers, and the victims of the theft were even happier than the thief …
“I know thy sins,” Father Tornike said, not letting me open my mouth at this first confession in my life. “I can imagine … And I remit them for thee … But do not forget, from this day hence it will be more painful for thee to sin.” And he sighed knowingly. I was wrong not to believe him! Gaily I spat on Satan in the form of a scraper and broom, for which space had been found in a corner of the church. “Pah on Satan!” Father Tornike proclaimed, and all of us, marching in single file with candles in our hands, joyously complied. It was easy then for me to spit on him! Dear Gagi, precious Father Tornike … It was easy for you to get your first prison term, by baptizing the Pioneer camp during swimming! The children climbed up on shore, no longer in their red neckerchiefs … “One glass,” Gagi used to say, “will do me for a company of soldiers.” He had to use a little more on me, at the expense of the Pioneer camp and the potential company. Dear Gagi! Remember me in your prayers …
A certain editor, in particular, was saving me. She was attempting to arrange a trip to Tbilisi for me to participate in a roundtable on “the phenomenon of the Georgian novel.” For a start, I was given a newspaper assignment. To unmask a false hero. He had become a hero for Afghanistan, but that wasn’t enough for him: now he had saved a drowning man. As a psychological writer, I was supposed to prove that he hadn’t saved anyone; he had simply, out of inertia, been seeking “the heroic feat for which we always have room in our lives.”{67} For the liberal lady editor, this would be a permissible way of criticizing the war in Afghanistan.
I disliked her zeal. And I went.
The man sitting before me was very calm. As an experienced investigator, I had taken a seat with the light behind me so that I could see all the nuances of his facial expression, and so that he, accordingly, could not see mine. From the way he grinned, I imagined he had caught on. A glance sufficed him to complete his reconnaissance and concentrate on a chosen target. This, for some reason, was a loudspeaker. He oriented himself to it. Well, so I was a psychiatrist and he had a mania. I felt sure the office wasn’t bugged. I followed his glance. For some reason my patient was disturbed by a cord. It had been pulled from the outlet and was dangling somewhat short of the floor. Besides, it was tied in a knot. The knot had not been tightened. Well, but it was quite impossible to eavesdrop through that cord! The mere fact that the major had been summoned to talk to me and I was receiving him in an office—even though not my own (but how could he know it wasn’t mine?)—made me (a private, untrained, unfit for front-line service) his … how do they put it? … “junior in rank, but senior in position.” This cheered the outcast in me. My junior-in-position had accordingly remained silent and standing. I invited him to sit down and tell me the whole story. “But I didn’t plan on saving him!” the major began, not so much with irritation as with genial annoyance. “The thing of it is, it just so happened, the night before, I was reading this book by, sorry, mental lapse here, can’t think of the author. Book about one of us. Assistant company commander, he’s a hero, and his young lady is this nurse. Well, so what she does is, she saves this drowned man. Mouth-to-mouth. I remembered. I never meant to tell anyone. But Monday morning at the Academy they’re talking, how was everyone’s weekend, and they knew I’d planned to go on a fishing trip. So I said, Some fucking—pardon me—trip, when I had to dream his horsy teeth all last night. I mean, you know—mouth-to-mouth on somebody. So this fellow in my class, he writes it up in the wall newspaper. I mean, he wrote it up, but the garrison newspaper reprinted it. If I hadn’t’ve read it in that book, about the nurse, the mouth-to-mouth, I wouldn’t’ve dreamed his horsy teeth. I never planned on being a soldier. Thought about it a lot, of course. I was working at the factory, already had my five rating. So I get the notice, I’m called up: Go to training school. Well, so I went. Stopped by the plant recently—well, they all remember me, haven’t forgotten, and we had a drink, of course, I brought it with me specially. I even felt homesick for the plant. Well, can’t go back now, my qualification’s wrong, and anyhow I’m close to retirement. Soon as I finished training I got this urgent call and they put me on a plane. Where to or why, nobody knew. Then the helicopter, and an assault landing. So from my very first day, my first night. Back home they wrote that it started the twenty-first. Actually it was the twentieth. But that’s just you I’m telling, in secret. Don’t go and print it. We were the first to break into the palace. I can still see it, this blue room, all done in silk. But already empty. Just the one photo album lying on the floor. I looked at it for a minute. All these pictures of his family. Beautiful woman! You know. I’ll tell you honestly, in the beginning I wasn’t scared at all, it was even interesting. But then after I got hit the first time, I climbed into my armor and wouldn’t come out. Our Deputy Political Officer—nothing but praise for him, outstanding fellow—he says to me, Come on out of your armor (my tank, that is) or you’ll sit there forever. Well, I got hold of myself, and then I didn’t mind. You go on reconnaissance and you can’t shoot. You’ve got one combat knife for the whole squad, can you believe—the master sergeant issued them under receipt. And a forty-kilo walkie-talkie on your back. Your back’s all black and blue, sore as hell. But it’s necessary, so that they don’t notice you. You meet up with some Afghan, you have to finish him on the spot, so that he doesn’t report. Well, but since you can’t shoot, you place the knife to his ear and pound it, so that it goes ear to ear. Main thing is, keep it quiet. Well, there was this one fellow they didn’t kill, they loaded the walkie-talkie on him, like a donkey. He carried it the whole way. Then of course they liquidated him, what can you do. No great satisfaction in it. That Deputy Political Officer, he got promoted, and they sent a new one. Complet
e fool, still green. We crawled to their lookout—quietly, we had our feet wrapped. I stuck my head up: two men with rifles, by the campfire. I chose which to rush first, and I waved for him to go around the other side and take out the other fellow himself, and he says, ‘What?’ But I’d already rushed mine, and the other one heard and comes at me with his rifle butt. Took off half my ear. But I finished mine anyway, and the DPO, good man after all, croaked that one from behind. Was I hungry! And they’d just been eating a big flat bread. I broke it in half. It was spattered with brains, but this was a dark night, so I gave the spattered half to the DPO and kept the dry half myself. Didn’t matter, he never noticed. Then we both crawled around till morning: I’d lost my bolt when I swung my rifle butt. Never did find it. Later I substituted a Chinese bolt, it fitted, the fellows fixed the serial number for me.”
“So they gave you a Hero Star for this?” I asked.
“Nah, not for this, and besides they didn’t give it to me, just recommended me. You needed 160 killed, and I only had 129. My DPO, the one I told you about before, filled out the recommendation for the Hero, and he rounded the numbers up. He laughed. Doesn’t matter, he says, the Motherland will forgive. But there was two of us, and one star. They gave me the Red Banner of Combat. Now, your editor, she didn’t believe it that I resuscitated a drowned man. I noticed that, by the way—he was already totally drowned. The thing of it is, I’m casting my line, I look and there’s a sort of a pink bubble on the water. Turns out to be his back. He’d surfaced with his hump up, like a fishing float. Well, so I pull him out—his back’s dry, warm from the sun, but the rest of him is cold. I called, Who knows how to pump him out? And at first they’d all crowded round, but soon as I called they all scattered: Get an ambulance. Sure, an ambulance! I tried artificial respiration, didn’t properly know how. No luck! Now I remembered about the nurse, in the book. But the fellow must have been good and drunk. So I’m doing all this mouth-to-mouth with the puke. Two hours I struggled over him. Couldn’t believe it myself when he came to. At that point the ambulance pulls up. They start trying to find out who and what, but I’d had it up to here, I lit out the back way. Reeled in my lines. Some fishing trip! Our correspondent, now, the only thing I blabbed to him was how I had the fellow’s horsy teeth haunting me all night. No big deal. But he wrote it up. You ought to write about our orphanages instead. Such poverty, why, it’s terrible! I gave a talk at one of them, free, and later, can you believe it, after my talk, they stood in line to … just to … touch my hand—they’d walk away and there’s the next one … ” The major turned aside.
To wipe a tear, I thought, but he stood up. “Pardon me,” he said, and went to the loudspeaker. He undid the knot in the cord and sat down again, comforted: now there was order. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “I haven’t told you anything unusual. Anything secret. Only the date—that the whole thing started a day earlier than reported … but it’s not that much of a secret.”
We left together. I glanced with scorn at the editor waiting for us, and silently we walked right past her. Walked right past and on out to the street—waiting there for me all this time, and waiting there still, was good old Dryunya, my best buddy, a saintly man. It was his principle to drink as his hair-of-the-dog the same thing he’d drunk the day before, in the same amount and with the same man. The three of us went around the corner, out to the boulevards, to a Nadenka.{68} At that hour they were still serving. We had one beer apiece, and then Dryunya argued over who would pay for whom. The major paid, and we exchanged phone numbers.
Life itself was setting me an example: the Eye, Jason, the Afghan … One had to struggle with himself to make sure that what he saw before him was indeed what it seemed, and not what it was. One had to struggle! Make positive efforts! Regardless of whether they could become reality. I responded. I hired myself out to chauffeur a certain monk around the country roads of Vladimir Province. I left the cat in the care of my neighbor the singer. We inspected the abomination of desolation of ruined churches, and were desolated. The monk was a venerable thirty years old. His wisdom and maturity were equaled only by his inexperience. He was old enough to be my father, young enough to be my son. On the lenslike Vladimir meadows he gamboled like a calf, his cassock collecting all the pollen, and there were more flowers than the eye could see … I accompanied him in silence. He felt like asking me—but couldn’t. He wanted me to ask him—I don’t know what. “You see,” I said at last, plucking up my courage, “I believe in the Creator, I believe in Christ, I believe in the Virgin Mary. But there’s no way I can believe in the devil, that he actually exists … ” “Then what do you believe in!” the monk said indignantly. “Why, the air is swarming with them!” He gestured expressively, his arms describing a wide circle, and strode away from me in wide paces across the meadow. He was soon distant, and suddenly, for the first time, I noticed that he in no way perverted the not-yet-lost beauty of the Vladimir meadow! A monk—that’s the man of the landscape! Moved, I gazed after his small pyramid. It harmonized easily with the landscape: under the cassock, you couldn’t see that he had two legs … Could that really be the whole problem?! “Sanctified be thy chariot!” he said when we arrived safely. The automobile was sanctified, and I caught a whiff of smoke and burning, this time from none other than me, when I climbed in to drive home …
A new guest was already waiting for me by the house. In his little Zaporozhets coupe. Straight from Murmansk.
“We have enough grief without you not drinking,” Dryunya told the guest from Murmansk. But the man didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. And also—as we gradually guessed. Not what you might think in such a case, but just the reverse. Snow-white collar, razor-sharp crease in his trousers, loose pullover hanging from his shoulders, very neat crew cut with glints of gray. Thin, well built, supple. And shaved! His skin … a sort of special skin, a generation younger than he was. He spouted Kuzmin{69} by heart. How had he climbed out of his Zaporozhets looking like this? … If he didn’t drink, he could at least make a quick trip to get a bottle. Oh, he didn’t know the city. Dryunya readily volunteered to show him. Oh, he didn’t have room in the car: it was packed solid with household belongings, and he had even removed the front seat. We didn’t believe him and went out to look. Indeed, the whole car was crammed with books and ironed shirts. “ ‘Everything I own I cart with me’?” I asked. He indulged my joke. It turned out he was a drifter, turned out he was homeless.{70} He had the car, it seemed, but no residence permit. He had spent the summer drifting. Toward winter he had set out for southern climes, via Moscow, naturally, via me, naturally. A slew of people arrived, Dryunya’s family, the Great Gatsby’s guests. Rabbit’s friends and relations: U.B., a retired KGB colonel, Ustin Benyaminovich, simultaneously a grandfather and grandson (his grandmother was still alive enough to idolize him). Einstein, an Armenian, raw-vegetarian, and janitor, always good for a debate on the topic, Is vodka a raw foodstuff? And the singing Saltykov himself, a Saltykov from the sadistic Saltychikha’s line, not from the ones who were satirists and Shchedrins.{71} He walks right in, singing loudly:
Thus stone by stone, brick by brick,
We pulled that factory down! …
Then a young damsel arrived to save me from another who had arrived just the moment before. Not joining in our party, the guest from Murmansk led me out of the kitchen into the other room for a conversation alone together, and—it wasn’t immediately what everyone immediately thought, but to get me to read, in his presence, then and there, his manuscript. Granted, not a large one. We concurred in our assessment of Nabokov. There I gave him his due. But in my assessment of his text I was a disappointment, didn’t pass his examination, so to speak. The tête-à-tête was a failure. And he couldn’t hide a slight grimace of disgust when he once again inhaled all our stink. The women were crying on Saltykov’s shoulder.
To water do not speak of love!
She cares not for us, she runs through the pipes …
Water—that was the women
themselves, of course. Never mind about the pipes.
Zyablikov, too, showed up, a Pavel Petrovich in his own way, a rare guest—and immediately provided drinks all around. He had smoked all the grass of the Buddhists, drunk all the church wine of the Orthodox, and now he outdid himself as a psychic.
And in truth, his power of persuasion was colossal. “Absolutely, you have a bug here somewhere. I smell it … ” Cockroaches, yes, but I prided myself on not having bedbugs. “Come on, you know what I mean!” The bug proved to be an eavesdropping device. Zyablikov half closed his eyes and began making passes with his hands. “Here,” he determined, pointing to the ventilation grille. “Know what you should do?” I still didn’t know. “Rip off the grille … Do you have any kind of lance?” Well, a poker. “Rip off the grille,” he insisted. “Take the poker and go at it … ” He made a savage face. “Crash! Run it through!” He plunged an invisible lance into it and suddenly looked like St. George the Dragon Slayer. There was even something Georgian about his ordinary, snub-nosed face. Dryunya performed the whole procedure, gesture for gesture. They hadn’t found the poker—a fragment of my only mop was left sticking out of the mutilated vent.
The girls, without ever choosing, departed with Saltykov and Zyablikov, in complete harmony. And I was left alone with Dryunya, as always. He instantly took it upon himself to propose toasts, and this he did for a long time. I endured it, because he was claiming that I was a genius, and it was hard to outargue him … “Our whole misfortune,” he sighed, “is that we have absolutely no Salieris!” “Sure,” said the girl who had returned after all, “but we have a shitload of Mozarts.” We had a good laugh.
HE was offensive—I was offended. The girl proved to be a lady, an ex-wife. Dryunya was a knight. He couldn’t bear to see her treated this way. “And what do you have in your briefcase? What’s in it? Nothing. Your lousy briefcase is empty!” Anger scalded me. And it was no longer Dryunya who dared to say such a thing to me, but Sergunya, our good old mutual friend.
