by Andrei Bitov
“I’ve been thinking about our conversation all night,” he said. “The thought occurred to me that there is nothing poorer than a rich imagination. It hypnotizes its possessor with the brilliance of its very first picture—the most banal and primitive, as a rule. In the same way, the pessimistic eye naturally sees a more convincing view. We cannot be sure of any far-reaching causes or effects on the basis of our own experience; we won’t live to see the results of our experiment in the course of our one life … Such is man’s time span—unequal to either history or life. Yet another basis for pessimism. Its other eye. To an honest young man my optimism may seem unconvincing, labored, self-serving … But throughout this game we always have a gambit in reserve, which we haven’t been taking into account. Give it any name you wish: our ignorance, or the will of the Most High. Yesterday you called man a parasite found in the earth’s ‘safety margin’ (your words or mine?), as if in her skin. I came close to agreeing with you. It may all be true, but none of us can evaluate—not hypothetically, not imaginatively, but practically—the size of that margin. It’s like fortune-telling. Yes, a trip, yes, a government house, and of course a woman. But when? The time is not named. Until the temporal coordinate is defined we may hypothesize whatever we like. Anything will fit. And if we can’t determine the ‘safety’ coefficient, we can’t determine the role of either man or progress. To the same extent that we can hypothesize that man won’t stop, that he’ll take the ax of progress and lop off the bough he’s sitting on—to an equal degree, we can hypothesize the opposite … Since our earth is still large and sufficient for life, isn’t our consciousness that she’s catastrophically diminished (by instant communications, information technology, and so forth), and likewise our consciousness that she’s appallingly denuded and ravaged, merely a form of defense for her? A warning sign, a signal, switched on far ahead of irreversible danger, so that we’ll have time to take heed … Which is to say, I believe that the speed with which we conceptualize the danger is out of proportion to the earth’s real situation. And this, then, to use your terminology, is man’s ‘safety margin’: the guarantee that he will have time to learn from his visual aid, progress. That is, the acceleration of progress isn’t excessively great, it’s sufficiently great, just so that we’ll have time before the catastrophe. Perhaps quite soon there’ll be a graduating class, the end of man’s high school education … the setting-up of the experiment in the school laboratory, a false explosion … sparks in the physics lab, a stink from the chemistry classroom—no more.”
For some reason I felt offended. Offended that he had shot ahead to be the first to speak my words. Offended that I was “young” (even though “honest”). Who was he, to play the old man! Two years younger than I. And then suddenly, as we turned back, our idea hit me. The idea that our conceptualization of reality might prove swifter than reality, and that this was our guarantee, this high reaction rate … The idea struck me as new, despite its affirmation of life. Practical experience made me grin wryly. Wasn’t I a witness that people don’t learn anything! Even if you bash them on the head … But “we always have a gambit in reserve,” he had said. I liked that gambit.
The morning was delightful. If it was indeed pretending, the pretense was even better than the real thing … I walked out to the trap. Its nets, still wet and heavy, sagged in steep curves. In the narrowest part of it there was a kind of final receptacle, where the feathered prisoners languished. There weren’t very many. Two or three sparrowlike birds … Suddenly I heard a laugh, a rather odd one, unfamiliar but distinct. As though an old man had come up behind me, unshaven, husky from smoking, and just a touch crazy … Where could he have come from? I turned and saw … No one. I felt impelled to shrug my shoulders, just in case. Then, from the same spot, the same old man let out a distinct, teasing caw. I glanced back angrily and caught sight of Clara. She had taken a convenient, spacious perch, on a bough neither thick nor thin, and was comfortably observing the trap and me. When she saw that I had caught sight of her, she behaved more than oddly. She burst into avid, screeching caws—these were what I had earlier, absurdly, associated with laughter. She choked, capsized on the branch, and swung upside down, croaking softly. Nimbly righting herself, she again broke into violent caws, flapping her wings in delight and stepping impatiently, but with no intention of taking off. I inspected myself. How could I have provoked her to such behavior? This was absurd, it wasn’t I who … I followed her gaze more attentively and only then saw the large bird darting around in the middle of the trap. Goodness knows what it was—it darted so swiftly—an owl, a jay, a cuckoo? not a magpie … a bird as big as Clara. It had landed in the trap, thrashed around in search of the exit, and inevitably bumped into the net. Recoiling, it had descended deeper, closer to the final receptacle, beside which Clara and I were watching. The captive still was closer to the exit than to this end, and the exit was wide open, in contrast to the swiftly narrowing throat of the trap, yet however much the bird resisted, it only moved deeper. Strange, I thought; right now, you know, you could fly out more easily than in … Clara was cawing with might and main. And this wasn’t sympathy or a summons. As before, it sounded like laughter. She kept capsizing, swinging upside down—“Oh, you’re killing me!”—and again choking ecstatically and happily, as if with laughter. Suddenly I realized that this really was laughter. No doubt about it. I remembered asking the doctor whether animals had a sense of humor … Now I had my answer. Clara thought this was unbearably funny: a bird as big as she was had landed in the trap. As I’ve already mentioned, this happens rather rarely—large birds are smarter and understand the trap. Of course there was also a shade of cruelty, a despicable triumph (“Not me!”) in Clara’s laughter. But indeed it was laughter. “What a fool! Ca-aw!” laughed Clara. “So big! Caw, caw! Such a fool! Ca-a-aw … ” She may even have been so astounded by the bird’s stupidity that she felt no personal triumph. “You fool!”
… How could I keep from chuckling at myself—an even larger creature! …
For labor under the sun there is also a reward. We should neither underestimate nor overestimate its dimensions. We should give thanks.
As I pored over the conversations of my two peripatetics, I myself gained some insight
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
A first-grader of my acquaintance named Julia, who had become a writer while I was away, summarized my whole string of confidences much more briefly, though she hadn’t heard them. For reasons of style, apparently, she set her story in a “studio” instead of a school.
Here it is, word for word:
“Yesterday a foreigner came to our studio. He told a lot of funny stories, but we didn’t understand him. Luckily, there was an interpreter with him. He explained to us that the foreigner was telling about crows and magpies. It turns out that these birds, who look so much alike, can hardly understand each other.
“When I got home that morning, I thought: How strange! We had such trouble understanding him, and that’s just what he was telling us about … ”
THE SECOND TALE
Man in a Landscape
(the Novice)
Behold the stone …
—THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS{13}
… and that’s just what he was telling us about.
This place didn’t recall a homeland—it was one. And it didn’t belong to me. I won’t name it. Its anonymity will be my excuse. This happened in 1979. I was here for the first and last time. The description, for fear of being inaccurate, will be minimal. May anyone who recognizes it forgive me.
It was unexpected, this place. Or had become unexpected. This had occurred within our visible life span. Before, perhaps, the place had seemed to grow up from some broader locality, to crown it. Now it was strikingly incongruous, impossible … for the city on which it was based had already ceased to be. No, this isn’t a description after an atomic attack. There is construction here, there is life; the avenue goes straight, always straight, and with no change at all becomes a
highway; the same dead-white multistory boxes, occupied and unoccupied, finished and unfinished, all equally un-livable; no people can be seen going in or out of them; you feel as if you’re riding through one and the same place—that is, standing still; and here, at the city limit, when the highway finally plunges back into the less developed space of Russia, you have to turn left, and your mind is so lulled by the monotony of the road that you are quite unprepared for perception.
For one thing, there are hills. For another, trees. As though the earth had started to breathe, its breast rising and falling. You, too, begin to breathe in rhythm with the crests and turns of the road, which by now is humanly narrow. Here, snaking along the hill, is the white stone wall of a citadel, and at last you come to its improbably thick and sturdy gates. Inside, on the grounds, everything is different. Level lawns, old trees, a church of God … A museum and a nature preserve, a happy home for ravens. Space. First cultured, later a culture park. There are also ancient wooden buildings here, out of character, though very agreeable in themselves. They were moved here from all over the North. You visit the log cabin in which Peter the Great stayed in Archangel.{14} You measure your height and palm against his (a notch on the doorjamb, a cast of his handprint). Gradually you leave behind you the section of the park that has been completely restored and rehearsed. Increasingly often, you come across piles of building materials and trash, with a view of an astonishing bell tower, a masterpiece of Russian Gothic. The peaked polyhedron of its hipped roof is inscribed in a similar polyhedron of construction scaffolding, and although the eye is unaccustomed to it, this multifaceted angularity somehow remains Russian. When you have seen your fill of all the restorations and restorations-in-progress, you may walk on …
Oh, this imperceptible transition, from the life-affirming ugliness of construction to desolation and incipient wildness! Weeds. Does the plantain have a unique power to triumph over being trampled? Or has it learned to enjoy being trampled, to prefer it? Burdock, thistle, dandelion … Their clean leaves are already coated with dust. Tin cans grow into the earth, turning rusty and red; the text in the scraps of newspaper fades; rags rot away, corpselike, pining for the human body; the dusty thistle is replaced by leaves dusty since birth, so caressing to the touch. This is life taught by death. (Here I saw a red toothwort, obscenely poking up through a trash heap. All my life I have carried the toothwort with me as a childhood horror, like the words “war,” “fascist,” “solitary confinement”—though it later proved to be merely a plant. It grew for me in 1944, behind the mess hall of my first Pioneer camp, and we called it an earth cancer.) How wonderful, the way nature struggles with the civilized layer! These trashy flowers and grasses are her infantry, winning back the earth for her, in order to restore their own culture. Wilderness is not this desolate. Nature is desolate only where something has previously existed, even if a beautiful park. The raspberry canes, now small and wild, had escaped into a ravine, and I followed them. A festering brook flowed there, and a new board had been thrown across it.
Climbing uphill from the new board was a rotten staircase, steep and high, with one railing collapsed and the other crudely repaired. Up here it was shady and gray, with a dankness in the air. Everything still gave the appearance of having escaped from cultivation, especially the green leaves. The leaves weren’t green, although they were no longer dusty. They were as tinny and colorless as the leaves of an artificial wreath in a neglected graveyard. But you had only to reach the top at last, climbing past the missing steps, and there, indeed, was the graveyard with the trashy wreath.
Culture, nature … tall weeds, fallen crosses. A haggard face. It was painful to imagine what it must have been like here some three or four centuries ago, when the builder first came. How graceful, finished, and exact it had been. The sumptuous skeleton could still be seen through the tattered rags of drapery: the bank was just as steep, the river just as wide, and just as unexpectedly the bank receded, leaving below it the soft green lake of a flooded meadow, and in the distance it turned suddenly as if at a shout and froze in the far-off blue of the forest, as though the river, in swerving, had switched banks, the left becoming the right, and the right the left … The sky, too, probably remained as before, although perhaps just slightly faded. What lines there had been, if they still remained! Such lines that the abbot and the builder had sighed, deeply and in unison. Their doubts had vanished: Here!
Nature could offer nothing greater. The perfection of her offering was plain to see. Such places call for a temple, a citadel, a city. Within a century or so, people had mastered this space, made themselves a part of it, and it had become civilized. Now the finish and perfection of that civilized space could only be inferred—from the “entrance area” (no longer the entrance to a monastery, but to the “grounds”), where everything had been restored “as it used to be.” In its newness and tidiness you could see the dispatch of the “plan.” They had used whatever paint they had on hand, the lawn was somewhat less than a hundred years old, and the boards and logs still remembered the haste of the woodsman’s ax. But it’s all right, never mind. Time (and not much of it!) will pass, and, before everything here begins to fall apart again (this time even faster), there will indeed be an interval when it becomes almost “as it used to be.” Time also labors, after all, like man: at first perfecting, and only later destroying. Such a curious quantity of boundaries! Wilderness bounded by a civilization returning to the wild; the wilding civilization, by civilized space; the civilized space, by ruins; the ruins, by wilding gardens; the wilding gardens, by wilderness … Everything here was in mutual transition, mutual schism.
I scrambled up the precipice. Never will you see such abomination of desolation—not even in a tangled windfall—as in a ruined cultivated space! Oh, how much wilder than wilderness is incipient wildness! The wind murmurs triumphantly in the garbage pit that was once a church and a graveyard. Wreaths toss, tin cans roll about, a newspaper gallops like tumbleweed. Heaps of bricks and filth grow up. Ravens take wing, circling over the past, not the present. And layer shows through layer, structure through structure.
Now, skidding and detouring from layer to layer, you find yourself at a sudden overlook. A sharp whistling breath (by no means a sigh of relief) penetrates your smoke-filled chest: you can see all from here! All as it used to be. My God! How does it always survive, this unique point of … not of view, but of origin—where you wake up and recall, yes, recall, how the world used to be?
But don’t attempt even one step to the side! If you should have the good fortune—no, the honor—of finding yourself at such a point, it will be unique. One step to the left and a flock of tower cranes has pecked apart the space on the horizon. One step to the right and you plunge down the cliff, into the garbage pit and dumping ground. One step back and you land on, or tear your trousers on, barbed wire.
Culture, nature … But who had destroyed all this? Time? History? Somehow the who and when eluded me. If only I could see him with my own eyes, grab his arm and twist it behind his back … Somehow he hadn’t crossed my path. I hadn’t met the perpetrator of the destruction, any more than you meet the author of a joke … The only people around were those who guarded this place or loved it. But who disliked all this, when we all loved it? Who disliked us this much? …
I was gazing from a unique point.
No, something remains in this world!
Oh, if only I’d known that I wasn’t seeing and understanding it the way I’m writing it now. If only I’d taken to my heels! … I understand and see it this way now. It’s hard not to confuse past with future, right down to their sequence in the present, if space itself, which seems to us more objective, has confused them (the times) this badly.
I lurched to a stop, too anxious, or shy, or timid, to take even a step. The unsteadiness of my pose could be attributed to the uniqueness of my viewing point.
And there he sat. The destroyer of the last point … Holding a brush, in an implausible pose, on an unste
ady, tilting stool. I hung over his shoulder. He turned around …
I won’t venture a description. I was so non-existent in his eyes that I don’t know why I didn’t vanish. To say that he looked at me with fright is inadequate; with terror, incorrect; with horror, inexact. For just a fraction of a second I was suspended in his swaying stare. But his stool swayed, too, his brush jerked, and he hurried back to his earlier point, never noticing me. For just a second he swayed on the thread of my stare, like a tightrope walker regaining his balance.
Once more, nothing connected us. He went right on sitting and painting from the unique point at which I, too, found myself.
The woman I loved wasn’t there to enjoy the view with me … But it was a long time since I’d had her with me!
The bottomless pit is not empty, and emptiness is not a bottomless pit. I went flying through both.
I was enraged. Specifically, at this painting automaton. He had blocked my unique viewing point. The landscape under his brush utterly failed to match the uniqueness, the chosenness of the site. Something wrong with the color … He was apparently proceeding on a diagonal from the upper left corner of the canvas to the lower right. The deep blue forest at the upper left, the silver horseshoe of the river bend in the middle; in the lower right corner, invisible to the painter and clinging like a stuck bristle, sat the painter himself. The upper right was blank for the sky, undepicted as yet, unshadowed by either cloud or cross or bird. In the lower left was a dark blur. I glanced over my left shoulder. This was uncalled for, as though he could paint something that was behind him, as though by glancing over my shoulder I could see my own self … There, growing up from a trash heap, was the terrifying, taut phallus of the toothwort. I shuddered. That, too, was a stare. Who could have expected this moss-face with the easel to look at me just that way. The way she used to! She wasn’t there. He was.