by Andrei Bitov
Everything here in this preserve had been preserved, geography included. Sea, bay, dunes, shores, forest, grass, sky, and birds—not only were they present here, in very close proximity, but they also matched the secret images that we associate with the words when we pronounce them to ourselves with our eyes closed: “bay,” “forest,” “birds” … A reification of concepts, a realization of the dictionary.
Space seemed smaller here by one dimension. At the expense of the one, the other two were fully exposed. Tighter here by one, but roomier by two … Since the theory of relativity is hard to explain through any example accessible to us in experience, mathematicians suggest that we imagine a comic character who exists in two-dimensional space. To tell the truth, he’s no easier to visualize than the theory itself. Here on the Spit, however, I could exist almost like that more-than-flat man—in profile alone. I have to say that the poor fellow’s existence, though he has been cheated of a dimension, can only be envied.
I could, for example, naked as Adam, walk out of my cabin to the western shore and start north along the sea, at the edge of the tide, without meeting a single person. And walk thus for an hour, two hours, three—the whole day, all night, always meeting no one, always going the same way, north, as if along a compass needle. I walked until I tired of it, for an hour, let’s say, or two, north along the western shoulder of the highway … and when I did tire of it I turned around: crossed the highway and trudged back, this time down the eastern shore, this time strictly south, but again along the edge of the water, again along the highway, again keeping boundless water on my left and the highway on my right … The Spit ran south to north (along a steady straight line, on the map or from the sky) for a hundred kilometers, yet where I lived it was no more than a kilometer wide. So I, too, on this geographical knife blade, strolled only north or south, balancing between west and east.
From my early school years I remember those poignant zoo-geographical maps, covered with profiles of wild animals, according to their areas of distribution. Since these were visual teaching aids, the animals were the main thing you had to be able to recognize on the map, and this led to an utterly catastrophic violation of scale. Belgium and Holland together would be covered by a bunny, with a scrap of Denmark fitted between his ears. A ram with fabulous doughnuts for horns would stand with his front feet on one side of the Hindu Kush and his hind feet on the other. Not to mention the elephant (the proportions of the animals were more strictly observed on such a map), who easily covered any of the newly developing countries. Without meaning to, the map greatly exaggerated the place of wild animals in the modern world, thus overriding for a long time, in a child’s consciousness, any anxiety about their fate. Well, on the Spit, even that map was remembered as not being much of an exaggeration. Not to mention jackrabbits, because I already have, but each time I took a walk I had every chance of encountering a roebuck, and if I was lucky, a fox or even a boar. When such an animal openly crossed the road within a few feet of me, running along a parallel that intersected this naturally demarcated meridian, and he wasn’t in scale but what they call “actual size” on this narrowest of all lands I had seen—then the scale changed, the animal truly did almost cover the Spit from sea to sea. I recalled the map every time, and smiled indulgently at my loss.
That is also why the birds fly so eagerly over the Spit, dipping their wings to both seas. They fly above the exposed meridian and temporarily switch off all the locators that help them map their flawless route with such precision across forests and mountains: north in spring, south in fall. The birds relax on autopilot over the Spit. All clear, just keep on flying. The birds spend the night on the Spit, gather their remnants of energy for the remainder of the journey … All in all, the Spit is the largest port on the world’s air-ocean, unequaled in its bird traffic. Here the bird researchers have built their nest. Here, too, a diffuse human consciousness has spread its snares and traps.
No matter how man has rigged himself out technologically, there are some basic items he has been unable to reinvent. The latest model of car rolls on wheels like a wagon, food is prepared in a pot over a fire, and the freshest fish, even from the newest seiner, are caught in nets. Birds, too—the fish of the air-ocean—are caught in bottom nets, just like fish, the deep-water birds. In the air-ocean the law of Archimedes grows weak, and universal gravity grows strong. Here a cork just barely pops up—a cork from a champagne bottle, at that—and fishing floats sink, rather than soaring up as they do in water. These nets look strange to an outsider, rising as they do from young forest against a background of sand dunes. From a distance, with the light gleaming through it, this fallen, truncated, four-sided pyramid may look airy and azure, harmonizing with the classical topography of the Spit in its own way. Up close, when you see the massive logs used as stretchers, and the rusty cables used as bracing wires, which have a hard time raising the weightless-looking nets to a height of nearly fifteen meters, you begin to realize, with a modicum of justified relief, how difficult it still is for man to carry out simple construction decisions with his own hands, how awkward and primitive man himself still is. And although the researchers don’t net these birds for their daily food, but rather band their legs with a weightless little ring, record them, and release them to the ocean, there is a kind of justice in this still-primitive hunt, an equality of rights, perhaps, between bird and ornithologist, a modicum of morality in this seining. (Here I can readily imagine the shrug of their shoulders: they would gladly get a more modern rig—given the chance.)
In summer, only foolish little strays drift into the nets. The traps are turned around when spring is over, their mouths facing north in anticipation of the fall migration, the seiner’s fall voyage. After the initial Martian weirdness, your eye grows completely accustomed to the traps. They even add something for you, when you mount the dune and survey the whole surrealistic landscape of sand, sky, and sea—an empty net is quite fitting here, spread out in these barrens as if a flood tide had recently been and gone … The eye grows accustomed, and so do the birds who live here. They are perched along the crosspieces and bracing wires—audacious crows!—on the brink of a threatening perdition. But no less audacity, with an equally blank stare, can also be seen in people crossing a street, for example. A man won’t walk into the path of a car any more than a crow will fly into a net.
The local residents, too, mainly fishermen and the families of fishermen, are accustomed to these nets. Except that they find it comical and wasteful for a net to serve other than its intended purpose. So ridiculous, this pastime of idle scientists, who nonetheless get paid (though admittedly not very much) for doing nothing, while the fishermen slave on the seiners, taxing their bulging muscles …
But a considerable mental feat was required of me, too, in order to surmount this step when I tripped on it, and to discover that my sneer wasn’t essentially much better than the local one.
There are numerous ill-starred areas of the human mind in which we all have the illusion that we are specialists in some degree. The illusory accessibility of our pursuits is a target for the ignoramus: he hits it.
And really. After the traps, the next facility to arrest the tourist’s attention was a certain shack known as the “Markovnik” (in honor of Mark, who had built it). Chinks of daylight showed through it: round boxes were mysteriously arranged on its roof; indoors there were clicking instruments, which looked extremely complex; the multitude of different-colored wires, forever in a tangle, was awe-inspiring. And here I note privately that the standard of complexity for my entire life has been, and still is, the sewing machine, which I was forbidden to turn …
Those mysterious round boxes on the roof, for example, proved to be merely cages, open to the sky, each with just one bird in it, hopping along radial perches. A system of wires connected these perches to electrical measuring devices, which clicked every time the bird hopped to the next perch. Mark wanted to know which of the perches the bird hopped to most willingly and often,
and at what time of year: the northern perches? the southern? … He was studying the guidance of migratory birds.
That’s all? But what a wonderful installation!
This is what I, who am wholeheartedly on their side and have been graciously admitted to their habitat—this is what I catch myself thinking …
The last time I came, I was lodged in an attic over the “staff room,” where laboratory work was done. For an attic, this was luxurious—actually, the second floor of the largest building at the observation post. It was piled with old nets and various research rubbish. I wandered around the attic, happening upon strange items—say, a bundle of glass eyes in various sizes, from owl to sparrow, for stuffed birds … I enjoyed it here. I paced up and down the long attic, past the nets, in a tense creative silence. If I grew bored with meditative pacing, I could walk out on a peculiar little bridge, the landing of an outside staircase, and gaze from on high, with a captain’s squint, at the view that lay open to me. I saw dunes and forest and sky, and the trap with resting birds perched on its wires. I could gaze thus for a moment, as if in deep reflection, and return with a sigh to my manuscript, which hadn’t made one line of progress. As it turned out, I accomplished a great deal of work in that attic, half a novel. I discovered this with surprise when I got home, and my attic existence took on the color of special happiness and success. This time, too, I was relying on the attic again, for I had exhausted all other methods. Therefore, when the attic proved occupied I felt it cruelly, as a blow to my last creative resources. The sole cause of my silence lurked in that attic.
The attic now had a far greater population than when I lived there. It was banked with cages of young birds, who had been raised in such a way that the starry sky was the one thing they would never see in their lives. Research Associate N. was studying the role of the starry sky in their overall guidance system … Every morning I sourly watched her haul the cages down from the attic so that during the day the young birds would be in the air and sunlight, conditions more natural than her experiment. And every evening, when it began to grow dark, I watched her haul them back indoors under the attic sky, in exchange for the starry one. The staircase was narrow and steep, with wobbly railings … the cages were bulky and awkward, so that she couldn’t see where she was going … my glance, as it followed poor N., was not friendly.
“Don’t you think,” I said, catching her yet again at this clumsy pursuit, “that you’ve been studying the effect of carrying the birds upstairs every day, rather than that of the starry sky?”
Receiving no reply, I trudged off to my cabin.
This cabin had graciously been made available to me by a staff member who was away on vacation. It had been built “for himself,” with great respect for his own taste. The builder’s personality was imprinted on everything I touched here: the mark of the craftsman. Skill in the practical arts was especially characteristic of the inhabitants of the research station. The very presence of skill, in our day and age, had always been important evidence to me. I recognized that it was not in vain. It meant that their main work, although invisible to the philistine and never understood by me, also contained this trait, since it was so dramatically revealed along the periphery … The construction materials had been found on the seashore. The walls were papered with maps—geographical, historical (the Children’s Crusade, the Ottoman Empire), and nautical—on which, every once in a while, I discovered with surprise the very cabin in which I was staying. Everything folded back, jackknifed, the little table, the little chair, the bed, occupying no space, extremely convenient to use … I made up games with the owner’s personal belongings and found no use for my own. Such a cozy space, my thoughts parasitized on it.
And I walked out, away from the cabin—to drift around the premises doing nothing, stretch my legs on the narrow paths with the staff members, who drifted around doing their jobs. Once I noticed Associate N. carrying a small, flat box for trapped birds, and followed her into the “staff room” to see what she had caught.
It was not a migration season, the catch was haphazard. She had only three little birds. The business of measuring and recording had been repeated a thousand times; I always liked these practiced motions, which could develop no further except into virtuosity. A bird in the hand, in everyday life, is a more than rare phenomenon. Here, the hand seemed to have been invented just for the purpose. How conveniently, how precisely the empty hollow of our hand conforms to a bird’s little body, duplicating it! How rapidly and efficiently all this was done: the aluminum band was pressed around the tiny leg, the journal entry made, the wing measured … Now N. blew on the back of the bird’s head to part the feathers and determine its age, then tossed it upside down into a narrow, diaphanous bag, the pan of special scales. The bird weighed its eighteen grams. Next, with a luxuriant gesture, she flourished the bag from the open window … The little bird easily slipped out, dipped swiftly three times in unexpected freedom, and flew away from us forever.
I poked my finger (stiff and clumsy, compared to a bird) through the net. The last remaining bird glared at me with its angry little bead, then painlessly but courageously pecked my monstrosity of a finger.
I wanted to ask Associate N. whether the shock of banding would affect the bird’s later life (how would you like it if they did it to you!)—and this time restrained myself. I did not ask.
“What a nice little bird,” I said lyrically, removing my finger from the net.
“Little bird!” N. said scornfully. “How many years have you been coming here? You might at least learn the name of one bird. At least this one! After all, the station is named for it!”
“What is the station called?” I asked.
“Go outside and read it.”
I went outside. On the building was carefully written: Fringilla.
Fringilla—that’s just a finch. I have long known the word “finch,” I never recognize the bird finch. I’m always much more a member of my own generation than I suppose. I don’t know; what nuances of history or progress or the age can excuse these mental blind spots? Bird, tree, bush, weed … it’s just never reached the point of personal acquaintance. How cheated I always feel in the forest! Look, a bird fluttering up from a branch … What kind of branch? What kind of bird? “Animals have no name. Who ordered them named?”{6} How I value this poet, who has found an excuse for me. Actually, my ignorance does not inhibit me from a mute and prayerful delight in nature, if I happen to notice her … But—what poverty and destitution!
Birds? Crow, magpie, sparrow … Maybe the chickadee …
Flowers? Rose, daisy, snowdrop …
Butterflies? Cabbage butterfly … (Goodbye, Nabokov!)
At this point my twelve-year-old daughter enters, and in keeping with this text I continue the quiz. “Tell me, but don’t stop to think, just list them: what trees do you know?”
My daughter, in some surprise, but obediently: “Spruce, pine, birch … ” Pause. “Maple, oak … Maybe the chestnut?”
My daughter is honest, she doesn’t go on to name the ones she doesn’t know: elm, beech, ash. Those are words, not trees.
Next: “Weeds? … Dandelion, plantain, burdock … ” The rest are just weeds.
“June bug, dung beetle … ”
“Shrubs … Mountain ash, lilac … ”
How quickly the series slams shut! She knows no more than I do. She knows just as much as I do. Her generation will not correct the errors of mine. It will assimilate them.
“I forgot the ladybug—that’s another beetle … I know the birds better!” she said cheerfully, and then rattled off my ignorance, word for word, like a prayer: “Sparrow, crow … I know some sort of chickadee, and a little parrot … I haven’t seen a bullfinch, but I do know the bullfinch … ”
Silence.
“I know the woodpecker … The goose. I don’t know the duck. Oh, the chicken. A chicken’s not a bird.”
“Don’t you know the stork?”
“Pictures don’t c
ount.”
“The seagull?”
Silence.
“Fish?”
She brightened. “I don’t know any fish at all,” she said. “Not a one. Is a swan a bird? … You know who I know!” she said. I brightened. “The flamingo!”
It’s the time, of course. The swell of data, the flow of communication … Perhaps we keep our heads this empty so that someday we can stuff them with valuable, practical information? Otherwise we couldn’t fit it in? I don’t believe this. I remember too many makes of cars and televisions, more than the weeds and trees. Ignorance is ignorance. In the Space Age, a few individuals have been in space, even if they don’t know the names of living things. But I haven’t! It’s I who don’t know, not everyone …
So this, for me, will forever remain irreducibly strange: it is natural for us not to know these things. I couldn’t like a man who learned the names of mice and grass blades by rote, out of snobbery, in defiance of everyone. He would be as insanely precious as a madman, unnatural in his very naturalism. Artificial. Not to know, in the age of science, is as natural as breathing. This astonishes me. There is always someone who knows something that not everyone knows. Surely, not everyone can fail to know the same thing?
An existence in just two dimensions—only lengthwise and (an existence not very accessible to us) only upward—emphasizes the relationship between the top and the bottom, brings us close to the ideal of a homogeneous habitat. Within every skeptic, behind the mask of disbelief, there is a sighing romantic. “White the lonely sail . . .” Romanticism is bound up with the idea of existence in a homogeneous habitat, an existence inaccessible to us by nature. Poets gaze enviously after sailors and aviators who have realized a dream. There, at last, an idea is realized in pure, undisappointing form—“as though the storm brought rest.”{7} But no, not fully realized … They get there, but they don’t belong. Only in their vessel and only as a group and not forever: the corruption of return, the soul disillusioned by falsehood. “Give me nothing more! Just a boat and an oar! A boat and an oar … ”{8}