by Andrei Bitov
* * *
The doctor’s pen couldn’t keep up with his thoughts, nor the hand with the pen, which vigorously dodged the answer to Gummi’s question about O.
Matter and spirit are not distinct from one other, nor are they heterogeneous. Objects of the so-called external world consist of known combinations and relationships of the same elements of sensation and intuition that in other respects comprise the soul. Material objects and the soul are, in part, woven out of the same basic material, so to speak.
The duality of life, or the unequivocalness of madness? The quiver of existence or the fanaticism of the idea? Life unfolds on the temporal plane, surging vertically in relation to this plane, touching something higher, retreating, and touching it again, trembling and gleaming with a double reflection. In essence, this is a metaphorical system with a reverse sign: life is a reflection of an image. Image and reality … As in poetry, to give birth to the image, both naming and the removal of the name simultaneously are necessary (so the flow can be captured, but not stopped).
Division is the condition of wholeness. A healthy personality is clearly split or divided. But the splitting of the personality as illness is the cleaving of an unequivocal, i.e., monolithic and hard, yet fragile, relationship to reality. No violence of the idea or relationship can accommodate or reconcile those two planes, in relation to which each particle assumes its being. Natural division is in a state of constant and unquenchable merging: division as an illness is the triumph of life over the petty effort to find a system in it (or, not finding it, to satisfy itself with an intermediate version, to come to believe in it, and then, reversing, to try to pin down life again…)—the natural erosion of a lifeless nature.
Dr. Davin, in raptures, sketched out his “homonymic theory,” found among his papers after his death. It gave added life to his name in a new field that had only recently announced its independence, like the next Latin American democracy.
Why are homonyms rare in language? Because their occurrence points to a technical blunder in the system, the exception that proves the rule. Homonymy between two terms is the word gone mad; for every word is a homonym only of itself. Every word contains the spark of division into a sign (a stop) and the current meaning of what is signified (life).
Meanwhile, Gummi was striding through a field in active anticipation, lifting his feet up high so as not to disturb the stagnant heat in the grass. Grasshoppers flew out from under his feet. He smiled; he believed in good fortune. In his hands he held a bicycle handlebar.
* * *
Rhymes are another matter, Davin wrote. They initiate an elusive interrelation of meanings, thus dissolving them again in life. In this sense, poetry …
He was just about to formulate the meaning of poetry, which, one must admit, no one had ever before succeeded in doing. Right on the heels of this definition of poetry glimmered the dawn of the almost ineffable notion of “life.” And we ourselves are very disappointed that, just at that moment, Gummi prevented the doctor from uttering this truth. The doctor was even more upset than we are.
“What is the meaning of this!” Davin spluttered. After getting stuck momentarily in the doorway, a triumphant Gummi tumbled into the study with a clatter, gripping a rusty bicycle handlebar in his hands.
“This,” Gummi announced, somewhat perplexed at the way he had been received, “I have brought to you from the Moon.”
The doctor seemed to spread out, puff up, and then to hover above the desk, as amorphous as a storm cloud.
“No, really, it’s exactly the same kind…” Gummi prattled, plunging into a chasm of despair and clutching at invisible ledges of fate. But all was lost. Remorse strangled him. For the first time in his life he had acted like other people, not like himself. The doctor understood this immediately—he is wiser than anyone on Earth, of course. But Gummi’s falsehood was such a small and innocent one …
“I was very nervous today and couldn’t fly,” Gummi said. “But last time on the Moon I saw one just like it. I kept wanting to grab something just for you, but I didn’t find anything interesting. And then I saw this: exactly the same kind. I’m wondering if maybe I myself didn’t grab it and bring it back with me last time.”
The doctor didn’t hear his excuses. He didn’t hear anything at all. The eternal definition of poetry had just disappeared for good. He darkened in fury.
“Just a minute. I’ll be back in a jiffy. I’ll bring a real one.”
The doctor flew into a rage and couldn’t even hear his own voice. Gummi wafted in front of him like a ghost, like madness, a brown mist. Now he drifted in again, this time with the propeller of a future airplane in his hands, now with the leg of a giant grasshopper, the size of a horse …
And, seeing nothing, piercing the cloud of sobs and childish sniveling with his blind fists, slamming the door with all his might, then locking it and making it doubly secure by ramming an alpenstock through the door handles, and wrapping it with twine to secure it—after all this, Davin recovered somewhat. He still rushed about the study—there was something he hadn’t done to make his isolation complete. He dashed over to the window, then flung it shut with exaggerated haste so that the breeze couldn’t carry in even a spore, even a faint reminder … And he caught his fingernail in the latch. Jumping about on one foot in pain, swearing crudely and shaking his finger, his eyes met Joy’s.
For a long time he stood there in the middle of the room, feeling completely hollow and empty, and something began to hum in this emptiness. He stood there for an eternity—whether for an hour, or a second, he didn’t know. He walked up to the window like a transparent vessel, trying not to break or harm himself. He opened it gently, without a sound. The world looked at him. The grass, splashes of sunlight, the woodpile.
The grass is always greener … How much wood would a woodchuck … the doctor thought.
Gummi wasn’t in the yard. In the region of his heart, Dr. Davin felt an unfamiliar, incomprehensible warmth of love. Gummi … he thought. Just at that moment, his warming heart was seized by something external and cold. Something alien and invisible struck his compressed heart from the outside. It rang from the inside like a jar.
“My God! I must hurry! Just let me make it in time!” the doctor pleaded, stumbling as he ran.
* * *
At the police station they heard him out three times: first Sergeant Cups, who sent him to Officer Glooms; and then Officer Glooms, who sent him to Lieutenant Homes. Homes returned him to Cups.
“Blockheads!” the doctor said. “You don’t understand a thing. You have to initiate a search! He could be anywhere.”
“So,” said Cups, “what did he steal from you?”
When he returned to his yellow castle in the evening, exhausted from his fruitless search, he ran into Carmen, who was already half-dissolved in the twilight from her long wait.
“Gummi,” she said, and held out a scrap of paper. Davin snatched it from her hand and pored over it, long and myopically, trying to make out the words in the darkness. Finally, he struck a match.
No one needs me—
but someone needed my gift.
It is very simple to find yourself on the Moon—
but the Moon isn’t visible from it.
If you manage to love—
you lose love in yourself.
On the Moon no one will ask me about the Earth.
The Earth can be seen only from the Moon—
but only I saw it.
No one needs my gift—
and no one needs me, either.
Forgive me, Carmen …
I’m not a human being.
Davin burned his finger, and shook his hand. “Do you understand any of this?” he asked.
“You killed him,” Carmen said. The accusation didn’t offend him.
“Where is he?”
* * *
They found him there, a charred bag of flesh. He was strangely flattened, pressed into the succulent water-meadow in a bend of Co
ol Palm River. He was half-buried in the earth, like a cannonball. They recognized him by the bicycle handlebar, tied up in a bundle.
The doctor examined the body. The nature of the injuries was such that from a purely technical point of view, no sadist could ever have inflicted such damage. Only a fall from a great height could have resulted in this. But there was no sense in searching the empty field for an Eiffel Tower. Nothing of that sort was to be found in the entire state.
Davin looked at the sky in anguish. What he felt was neither pain nor grief. It was the horror of reason, the crackle of consciousness, the despair of a shipwrecked man in the middle of the ocean. He looked at the sky, calculating the trajectory of Gummi’s fall—the sky was clean, empty, silent. There was nothing up there. Then, his eyes roving across the impenetrable blue dome and coming to rest on a point at the far end of the meadow, at the edge of the woods, he saw the blue, cigar-shaped dirigible.
Davin clutched at his head like he was trying to crush it, and let out a howl. Stumbling and falling, and still clutching his head, he set off on a crooked course. He ran and ran.
While the investigation was going on, Davin fell into a deep depression. His colleagues were alarmed at his condition. He lay in one spot, his face turned toward the wall, and refused to talk or answer any questions. The investigation independently came to several conclusions, and he was cleared of the suspicion of murder (a suspicion universally held by the Taunusians). But these very conclusions led the case into a dead end.
A commission of experts corroborated that no human being was capable of inflicting that kind of injury on Gummi. Physical trauma of that kind could be caused by only one thing: a fall from a great height. The position of his body when they found him, not to mention the nature of the deformed ground beneath him, supported this conclusion. A person would have been incapable of falsifying the details of the event, as he would have had to crush the victim’s bones in just that manner and sequence. (And this was a time when forensic science had reached unprecedented heights, when its fame rang out, when the experts, before the very eyes of the admiring public, poured out a substance from one test tube into another, hung charts showing ballistic trajectories, and reversed the course of the most notorious cases: victims and defendants changed places, justice triumphed, and the careers of criminal investigators flared up and burned out like Edison’s lightbulbs.) No, the experts insisted, the corpse was not dragged to the field from the place of the murder. But why were the clothes charred, while the flattened grass was not? And then, excuse me, but where could he have fallen from?
If something like this had happened in our time, with its airplanes—or in an even more modern age, with its helicopters and rockets; or in the yet more distant future, with its extraterrestrials and flying saucers—the ordinary citizen’s imagination would have a small chink somewhere he could stuff the mystery into. Every age has its vulgarity and its superstition. Say, on an undiscovered planet in the Alpha-Beta galaxy, a planet-wide gala celebration is taking place in honor of the successful return of Astronaut 1 from the inhabited (though at a very low level of development) planet Earth. None of the dwellers on the planet mourn the unknown hero Astronaut 0, who perished while carrying out his mission and never returned from Earth but who had blazed the trail. No one cries over poor Gummi in his homeland, because no one knows about him, just as they would never have known about Astronaut 1 if he hadn’t returned. In that case, Gummi’s strange babbling about spending a long time in an inexplicable transparent membrane, his uncanny ability to travel through space, his claim that he wasn’t a human being, would make sense to us. One could elaborate on any number of theories and claims, in particular about his death, that he was, for example, an extraterrestrial who fell out of a flying saucer; or that he was not an extraterrestrial but had been picked up by one and, having mastered a few of the knacks of future civilizations, had damaged his normal human mind.
But all of this is the vulgarity and superstition of our future, the twentieth century; and at the time described herein, the end of the nineteenth, both vulgarity and superstition worked a bit differently. This was a time when the natural sciences were so triumphant that their claim to be able to explain everything they scrutinized could have been considered the only superstition. Any supernatural explanation elicited the contempt of the enlightened public. For this reason, all explanations of a decadent-mystical bent, which would come into fashion a bit later (in the era of “liberty”) as a pre-catastrophic spasm of the intellect—those connected with Tibet, magicians, and the like, ideas which would help us to imagine Gummi’s ravings about a monastery in Cambodia, the splitting off and flight of the detached incorporeal substance, in the spirit of H. Rider Haggard or Jack London—were dismissed.
Notions such as this, therefore, must be dismissed as irrelevant and inaccessible to forensic science. Not venturing outside the framework of a materialist perspective, then, the only thing left to do is to seize the dirigible by the gills, as it were, since it has drifted into our story so conveniently. Yet everyone who had any relation to the dirigible had an airtight alibi. The dirigible hadn’t moved from its position and couldn’t have been located above the spot where Gummi’s body had been found. The ninety-degree angle of his free-fall descent was beyond any doubt—the authority of Newton was still indisputable—and the imaginary vertical line projected from Gummi’s point of landing led only to an indisputably nonexistent God. The proposition of an expert in ballistics who suggested that Gummi’s body had been shot out of a cannon was also rejected, and the elderly retired colonel of the artillery was judged to be senile. The hypothesis that Gummi could have been struck by lightning was rejected with deep regret, due to the absence of thunderstorms for the duration of the previous one and a half months. The dirigible remained the only plausible explanation. But this was the era, not only of the triumph of materialist explanations, but also of the law’s supremacy in such matters as the presumption of innocence. It was an era when, due to a lack of evidence, poisoners and sexual maniacs were released from custody in droves. And the enlightened public applauded the prevailing legality.
Gummi had no one—no friends, no relatives—who might have appealed the case and demanded that the investigation be renewed. Carmen, his only executor, arranged to have him buried in the exact spot where he had been found, where the grave had already been partially dug by his own body. At his head they placed the bicycle handlebar, as later they would place the propeller of an aviator who perished in a crash.
* * *
Dr. Davin continued to lie on his divan with his face to the wall, and we would be hard-pressed to describe the kind of suffering that lacerated his—well, mind, rather than soul. It was neither regret, nor repentance, nor doubt: the brain itself, as everyone knows, does not experience pain. A certain empty bubble containing a single thought had formed there, which resembled a dirigible. It had floated into his consciousness back then on the edge of the field, and refused to float away. What did he want with this dirigible? What tormented the mind of this great scientist was that the only explanation of what had happened to Gummi that held water—the dirigible—did not satisfy him. The only possible explanation—that is, the only precise, logical, materialist, and, consequently, true explanation—was that Gummi somehow ended up on the dirigible and then fell from it. It did not satisfy him, not because he could refute it, because he could not. After all, he was the first person to see Gummi, and then the dirigible, and then to connect them in his mind as cause and effect as the only solution to the problem. But this connection grew in his head and burst like an abscess, unable to sustain itself as an explanation. It would not serve as such for Davin. It would not serve him for the simple reason that he did not believe it. And this disbelief in the only rational explanation implied, it would seem, that he did believe in Gummi’s inexplicable fall from a great height; that it was not a murder; and that he had taken his own life (the indirect reason for which he clearly acknowledged, but which seemed
to him, in his cerebral torment, immaterial). Since it was suicide, there was also a Moon, moreover a brown one, with a bicycle handlebar that had lain about in its deep layer of dust. But this wasn’t what tormented him, either. What was unbearable to him in his disbelief of the dirigible was the very fact of belief. Without the dis.
He never told this to anyone. The selfless Joy came to fetch him, ready to wipe away his spittle till the end of his days. He rose from the couch in silence, stuffed his manuscript into a suitcase, and they left for Europe. The doctor’s departure made a deep impression on the Taunusians. Because nothing happened after that for a good decade and a half before it all began—and how!—and they found themselves suddenly in the true twentieth century, with its progress, wars, and crises, and the departure of the doctor, the only preceding event in living memory, marked the boundary between the good old days and the new. “That was before the doctor’s departure,” they sighed. Or: “That happened after he left.”
But they are not our concern here. Nor, indeed, is Robert Davin, who achieved global renown in Europe and produced students and theories galore, almost exceeding those of Freud, whom we will also not concern ourselves with here. We would not have remembered him at all, were it not for the fact that some materials came to our attention not long ago that were connected with the Shroud of Turin. This is not the time or place to recount the story, which boils down to the question of the authenticity of the cloth on which is imprinted, like a negative, the image of Christ. (Those who are interested may consult the widely known articles by Dr. P. Villion and Dr. D. Falk, et al., on the subject.) At around the time of our story the Shroud was photographed for the first time, and the negative revealed a positive image. This sensation led to numerous strictly scientific verifications of what people had not doubted over the course of almost two millennia. The discussions, research, and articles surrounding the controversy reached their apex in precisely the year that the Shroud was exhibited to the public. I will cite just two arguments in favor of the authenticity of the image depicted on the Shroud and the reality of the story of Christ. These arguments present an especially heady psychological challenge. The first argument was that the idea of a negative image became known only with the discovery of photography, and that no artist, even one familiar with the photograph, would be capable (technically) of creating a negative from the positive image. The second was that the Shroud itself, and the linen bands in which it was wrapped, were preserved in the shape of a cocoon. Their covering had not been touched, and no natural processes can explain the fact of their integrity and wholeness except the Ascension. Christ was not unwrapped. He disappeared from them.