by Andrei Bitov
Here is a bird. A large bird. Look into her side-bulging eye—you’ll never meet her gaze. The little birds are the ones with the vivacious bead-eyes that we think we understand. This bird has a red, wild, fearsome eye. In the sky she is beautiful (“now touching her wing to the wave … ”{9})—here in your hand she is ugly and frightening. She is so definitely not one of us that you won’t lapse into any sin of anthropomorphism here.
This was a seagull (the staff argued, trying to determine her species). Seagulls do not get caught in traps. She had been brought in by a boy named Sasha, a Junior Naturalist acquainting himself with his future profession at the research station. He was ruddy, round-cheeked, dark-eyed, youthful, healthy, his mother’s pet. The seagull was shockingly unlike him. He was excited, and endlessly repeated his story.
Like Ivan the Fool catching the Firebird, he had caught this seagull with his hands. He had dived like a goalie and tackled her. Honest! He was walking along the seashore, the whole flock took off, and she was just sitting there. He dove. Tackled her, honest … He didn’t believe it himself: Can you beat that, a person who catches seagulls with his hands! … His heroic deed was fading in his own eyes. No one had criticized him, but no one had praised him, either. “I’ve been carrying her for two hours!” he said, hurt.
“But she’ll die of cold!” someone said.
This surmise brought immediate action …
Privately I have often noted a certain dignified unsentimentality in practical work (and have liked it more sentimentally each time). Thus the staff of the research station, who themselves had a very monotonous diet of mush and concentrates, would boil and chop eggs, scrape carrots, and so forth, every day, to feed their feathered captives what they themselves did not eat. They reminded me of parents whose children will never emerge from childhood. Or, for instance, not one of them had the slightest pang of conscience about disemboweling a bird for his own inane experiment, yet if any unforeseen loss occurred they were extremely vexed and grieved. One day too many birds flew into the trap, the staff failed to free them in time, and many birds perished. So they ate them! This wasn’t just professional chic, an exaggerated lack of squeamishness toward living things, a professional freedom from philistine ideas, an ability to eat both crow and fox. (There is no poisoned or inedible meat! Yet another peripheral discovery I made for myself in their habitat. A reminder, in case you’re ever starving to death in the forest—anything can happen.) It was also, although unconsciously, a matter of atoning for a sin before nature, where nothing perishes in vain. They transmuted this precedent into a hunt (the wolf is not bloodthirsty but hungry when he procures his food), they expiated their sin by ritually harmonizing their mistake with the ecological system, by pretending they had trapped these birds for food.
… They chopped up a hard-boiled egg, and one of them skillfully held the seagull, skillfully opened her beak, and tried to feed her. The seagull had no idea that they wished her well. Nor had she any idea that her refusal of food threatened her with death. She could not imagine that she was in the arms of a professional and not one of her feathers would be harmed. She probably assumed they had caught her to eat (if in trouble you can eat a seagull, too, although they taste terrible). She saw herself surrounded by people utterly unlike seagulls, and did not see the rescuing sea. She did not want to eat, she passionately expelled this rescuing food as if it were poison. The hero found himself on the sidelines, bewildered, and he stared distractedly at his empty hands that had caught the bird. After dinner the seagull died. The staff attempted to “find a niche” for her, too, in the name of the integrity of the ecological system—they gave her to Clara. Clara was indignant, however. She expressed her indignation in a very human way: cawed, flapped her wings like arms, maintained an outraged silence, and turned her back on caressing exhortations. I didn’t go asking questions about the true nature of her outrage (the bad food), for in my own way I shared Clara’s feelings.
With a mortal terror filling her crazed eye, this choking seagull stands before me as a generalized symbol, so to speak, all birds in one. This one-bird, if we were unused to their existing on earth at all, is a monster, a terrifyingly huge freak who cannot actually exist. She has just two spindly legs. Her feet are claws. Her coat isn’t even fur but flat, coarse-haired bones, which cannot be called by any name we already know, and we invent the word “feather.” She has a small, serpentine head with unseeing eyes at the sides; she can’t look at you with both eyes at once. Her mouth and nose are combined into a horn, which she opens with a loathsome sound. We can find no word for this and will label it conditionally a “beak.” Instead of arms or forelegs she has two fans—even we might think them beautiful, except that they have this streamlined, humpbacked, unnatural torso affixed to them. But if these unnatural parts are intimidating individually, what a monster this is in the aggregate! Take an insect—toward which we all feel an instinctive squeamishness and hostility—enlarge it to the size of a cat, and you will understand the aesthetic emotions you actually experience when you first see this one-bird.
I went out to the gulf. If the seashore was alive with surf, with all the attractive, ever-changing flotsam in its tidal zone, with the jaggedness and ruggedness of its forested dunes, then the bald, unforested shore of the dead-calm gulf was peculiarly empty and lifeless. The lines here were different from those on the sea—peculiarly smooth curves, flawlessly drawn. Here the towering dunes came right to the water, stopping abruptly at that maximum angle, which immediately led me to think of mathematics. Free-flowing dry matter. All this was flowing, falling—just touch it. But no one did, and it stood in an unthinkable sultry equilibrium. Above the scorching daytime heat of the sand the air was shimmering, turning this already dreamlike scene into a mirage. I was standing on the crest of a gigantic sand wave, ceaseless in its agonizingly slow race toward the mainland: here it smashed against the inert smoothness of the gulf exactly as the sea smashed against the shore. It was dizzying, this reversal of my habitual concepts, the smoothness of this sandy steep slope under my feet. Here was a place to launch gliders and paper kites … Those webbed, soundless airplane-ghosts would suit the landscape almost better than birds. The wind moaned in my rigging. I stepped into the void and experienced the emotions of Icarus. The sand caved under my feet, curved around my calves. In three giant steps I flew down to the water from an altitude of thirty meters. A river of sand overtook me and buried me knee-deep. I had added my millimillifraction, hastening the Spit in its race: behind me, the sand was spilling delicately, leveling my tracks. A few steps away, by the water, a dead bream lay on its broad side, with its upper side eaten away. Its death, still in progress, seemed to be the only life here. And now, motionless as a glider, the bird who had died yesterday slowly floated overhead. There used to be a fairy tale like this, about a man who sought a land of immortality … He thought he had found it. Nothing changed or grew old there, and time did not pass. But it turned out that once every thousand years a bird came and carried off exactly one grain of sand, designating that thousand years as a second. The man was disillusioned. Even in that blessed land, there was time … Yesterday’s bird, overhead, was from that tale, I thought: the implacable sand grain of my time was gripped in her beak. I leaned back against the dune without pulling my feet out, as if I had grown into the sand. What I saw had no name. I saw water, I saw a fish, I saw sky, I saw a bird … they had no names. I didn’t know that they were called water, sky, or bird. Perhaps this was fish stretching before me to the horizon, and the fathomless blue above my head was bird? Perhaps what had died in front of me was the water, and the sky had evaporated, vanished from sight? I had no way of knowing that the world didn’t stop beyond the horizon. Words, at last, were as empty as the weightless chitinous integuments mingled here with the sand. So they were empty after all. I had become separated from language, which keeps droning at me that the world exists, that it’s everywhere I go, it’s right here. And, as always, I sighed, I pulled away from the d
une through whose eyes I had momentarily looked at what was in front of me. I extracted my feet from the sand, one at a time. The fish was a fish and was called a bream, the bird was not sky but a seagull, what stretched before me was not fish but water, under the name of gulf; oh, and the sky was air, its own airy ocean. Beyond the horizon was Lithuania, invisible to me but solidly fixed. The sky alone had no horizon, beyond it lay the unknown, although that, too, had been stratified by someone into domains and terms—but those words live only in the textbook, and that is why we can still sometimes see into the sky, with this wordless kind of vision. I was confounded by the fact that everything had been named, pinned down by knowledge not contained in the things I saw. Which do we see: objects, or the words naming them? At least it is clear that the world we are coming to know has no reciprocal tie with our knowledge. Even if it is reflected accurately. Our knowledge merely reflects the world. But the world does not look in that mirror.
The mirror is man. You can lift your hand to your eyes, of course: My hand. Or look at your feet: My feet … But a man by himself, when he looks before him, does not see himself, and especially doesn’t see his own eyes, any more than a mirror sees itself. But even the things you can see on your person, as belonging inalienably to you—hands, feet, navel, below the navel—are not you, after all, they’re an envelope, a body, you’re inside … Look before you—you’re not there. Perhaps you are what you see before your eyes?
The sky was empty and ceased to be empty. All at once many birds flew over, a flock. The sky became empty. When one bird flew over, I saw one bird. Exactly one. How many had flown over just now? Ten? More. A hundred? Fewer. I don’t know exactly how many there were—fifty-five, fifty-nine, I didn’t have time to count them. But one thing is certain: there were a finite number, not one more or one less. I could not learn that number, and no one will ever learn it now. But since that number was exact and final, it exists, as though someone knew it … “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered … ”
One bird, and then all at once many, but how many? … The unit—that is the number I know. One—that is the count I keep.
Dividing by one is reality.
“I think I can guess—although with difficulty—what you’re getting at,” the doctor said. “Science really does have a certain inherent narrowness. Its concern is not so much world issues as things that can be accurately established. But your complaints show a certain incomprehension of the genre, to use terminology close to your heart. For us, a brilliant idea we can’t prove or confirm by experiment is unprofessional. It’s dilettantism, or leisure at best. Taken on faith, a beautiful idea can carry you far astray, beyond retrieval. There needs to be an element of sluggishness, as it were, in the ethics of the true scientist, who has ideas by the bucketful. Actually, to some extent, we do have a gap in our thinking, between the unit and the multitude; but the multitude is also taken as a unit, in some sense. Then again, the unit is taken as an element of the multitude … ”
We were walking along the shore and not seeing the sea. Yesterday there had been a “box gale”—assorted curiosities were spread out on the shore like wares on an endless display table. We walked along this market row. Wooden boxes were less common than bright plastic. We might find a keg or a pail, also lightweight and colorful. If we were lucky, it might even be undamaged, washed from the decks without reason. Here and there lay plastic balls—fishing-net floats, beautiful. The balls had survived intact, but we did not know what to do with their definitive form and lost purpose. We walked along, developing an idea, and suddenly a certain want of attention crept into the idea: there was something red or blue up ahead, attracting us. Studiously we avoided quickening our step. The idea rigidified, narrowed, and seemed to find its natural conclusion: this was half of a scarlet plastic pail, a vertical section. The intact side of the pail had been turned to us out of spite. We passed by this fraud—and a fresh idea gathered fresh force. A fresh apparition of a fresh item, up ahead, delineated the next pause or an unexpected turn of the subject …
“Haven’t you ever thought about the nature of man’s craving to gather things? Mushrooms, berries, birds’ eggs, collections? Or the gifts of the sea?” the doctor said, kicking a yellow float. It rolled back down into the rising tide. The surf was listless after the gale. “To understand what we inherited from our ancestor, we need to know what our ancestor was like. Morphologically, man isn’t very specialized for procuring a particular food. His original ecological niche was the gathering of fruit, herbs, roots, eggs, small animals, and coastal flotsam. Such a method of subsistence is inefficient and requires vigorous, varied activity. In contrast to many other species (herbivores, for example), man possessed limited food resources. Hunger was a permanent state … ”
Thus he resisted when I tormented him about man, but then lightly spilled his secrets himself. Even though he was full of a noble determination not to exploit his experience as an ecologist and ethologist by applying it to man, still, he himself was a man, and he couldn’t help thinking about the same things I did. Thus, without meaning to, he had already told me enough. In some respects his ideas were so convincing to me, I believed them so easily, that this very ease struck me as the best of proofs. With a dilettante’s enthusiasm, I was already using as my own many of the concepts he had taught me. Our conversation would follow this pattern: “You’re saying”—I would seize on a remark of his— “that … Doesn’t it follow that … ? Then don’t we have to conclude … ?”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” the doctor would agree reluctantly.
“Then,” I would say, “we can hypothesize … ”
“Yes, that, too,” he would agree stolidly.
“It turns out that man … ” I would say, heading into the homestretch.
“No,” the doctor would say, and easily rebut me, with arguments to spare.
I would retreat temporarily, nodding.
But by now he was used to the freedom of our conversations. Little by little I had corrupted him. His imperative was weakening. I don’t think this was because I was persuasive; all these ideas had been languishing within him for a long time, unusable. At first he spoke only of primitive man. In this connection, he might let slip such definitive sentences as: “Man has a low fertility rate compared to other animals.”
Or: “Flourishing species strive to increase their numbers and territory as much as possible. Man is a flourishing species; his urge to settle in new places and increase his numbers is natural. By the beginning of our era, the number of people on earth is estimated to have been two to three million … That was the antique world … ” He sighed pensively.
“Malthus … ” I said. Sand gritted in my teeth, and now we turned back.
The doctor’s attitude toward Malthus was complicated. History beckoned him. The ecologist in him was tempted by the epochs that showed through in the distant past, where vain details had been effaced and the count was kept not by decades but by centuries.
“Why do you think Alexander the Great stopped? … No, no, his military machine was flawless. There was nothing in the world that could resist it. Simply, he had gone so far beyond his geographic range, and he had won so long ago the lands sufficient for the further consolidation and prosperity of his own country, that the biological purpose of his aggression (to expand the territory for a flourishing population) was completely exhausted. By the time he reached India and Central Asia he was a traveler, almost an amateur ethnographer: he arrayed himself in the national garb of the new lands that had nominally submitted to him. There was nothing he could do but leave, with no likelihood of reaching the subjugated country ever again … He could not turn back, he seemed to have forgotten where he came from. His death was obscure. Thus all aggression miscarries, establishing only the necessary boundary to the expansion of its geographic range.”
“Interesting,” I observed. “It’s been a fairly long time since we had a war. Could modern tourism be viewed as sublimated aggression
?”
“Are you saying this to me, or am I to you?” The doctor was tempted. Like Alexander, he could no longer stop. He measured history in imperial giant steps. The same had also happened, as the doctor saw it, with a later people, the Norse (thus he was creeping into epochs closer to ours, while I, like a hunter concealed in his blind, didn’t breathe or move or interrupt). The Vikings had also possessed military might, comparable to Alexander’s. They had had no equal—they could have gained a world much more livable, from our standpoint, than their cliffs and fjords. But from the biological standpoint they behaved more logically than Alexander. They were strong enough to seize Europe, yet they discovered Iceland and Greenland, which Europeans find uninhabitable, and reached the northern shores of America before Columbus. They expanded only within the limits of their natural geographic range, the northern seas.
I had always wondered at the evident relief with which a man comes down … You no sooner gain a height, spiraling upward like a bird, than you immediately drop like a stone, mistaking some utterly inedible piece of trash for a gopher. But I, too, could not stop: “The history of Russia begins with the Vikings.”
“Even though north, it wasn’t their geographic range,” the doctor said. “Russia Russianized them. Their regime ground to a halt.”
“As in the humorous saying,” I said. “ ‘Come here—I’ve caught a bear, and he won’t let go.’ ”
“That’s it, that’s it,” the doctor agreed.
“But why did the Tatars bog down in Russia?” I went on.
The doctor humphed, chewed a moment, and concluded, “The steppes ended.”
“Did you think that, or did I say it?” I exclaimed admiringly.