The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  I did want to. He felt confident here. He had some sort of connection with all this.

  An enormous wrought-iron key protruded from the door. But the door was bolted from the inside as well. He joggled it and knocked. Cawing, the ravens took off from the bell tower. They made the sky even whiter.

  He knocked again and said, “He’ll open up in a minute.”

  From the river, accentuating the emptiness of the dusk, a barge horn lowed like an ox. That farewell bellow almost brought a whiff of leaf smoke.

  “But are they … or what?”

  This remark sobered me somewhat. I pictured it too vividly.

  He started banging on the door with all his might.

  A gigantic, gray, serpentine creature detached itself from the dusk. I jumped and almost let out a yell. Good God!

  “Linda! Linda baby! You devil!” The landscape artist patted the devil affectionately.

  She was a Great Dane of dazzling horror and beauty, as white as marble.

  “Is Linda tired of waiting?” The tenderness in his voice was extraordinary. “Let’s go!” he said decisively, and turned the key in the keyhole. But now another thought overtook him. He removed the key from the keyhole and proffered it to me. “Keep it.”

  Perplexed, I held it in my hands. This was quite something. The size of our Great Dane.

  “Keep it, don’t worry. It’s a memento for you. When you get the urge, you’ll come back.”

  “But how will they … ?”

  “They’ll find a way. Shouldn’t lock themselves in … But nobody’s there.”

  Utterly uncomprehending, I trailed after them with the key in my hand. The road went uphill, and I leaned on the key as I walked. The she-devil ran ahead, now dissolving, now precipitating out of the thickening dusk.

  “An actress!” he related proudly from above. “I took her to be in a movie today. Next door here. They’re doing the Occupation. No, the German wasn’t here, strictly speaking. It’s a Novgorod scene they’re doing. She’s playing the Oberstambambramsegelführer’s pet.” He laughed invisibly, disappearing into a puddle of night. “Linda, my benefactor!” Evidently she had come running up, and now, as he waited for me, he was scratching her behind the ear. “Seven fifty for a day’s work!” he boasted, suddenly right in front of me. I bumped into him. “All the same, it’s Baroque,” he said, with either sorrow or satisfaction, staring over my shoulder, and I turned around.

  From here, from above, we could see the bell tower again. The moon, as red and huge as the sun, had crept up from behind the now invisible river. A dark pink glow wreathed the sharp spire. The church smoldered like a last coal in the night.

  We were going somewhere; I did not discuss where. A long, barnlike shadow solidified up ahead. At our approach a cellar window lit up and went dark.

  “The refectory,” he said.

  We found our way in, clattering and stumbling.

  “Just a second, I’ll flip the switch,” he said, and everything lighted up.

  This, to all appearances, was a restoration workshop. Carpenter’s bench, muffle furnace, shelving with canned goods … Bare bulb on the ceiling. On the wall, a movie-star calendar with Alla Pugacheva, and an advertisement for auto races. A huge, rustic bin. Similarly crude and ancient benches. Tiny barred windows stared blindly from the depths of the fortress-thick walls, as if squinting, as if puffy with sleep. Massed along the walls, like junk, like a scattered deck of cards, were layer upon layer of icons, icon frames, iconostases.

  “Are you interested in panels?” I did not understand, but with his eyes he indicated the junk heap of icons.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, of course.

  “It’s coming, Linda baby, it’s coming … You go ahead and look in the meantime. Don’t be shy.”

  Carefully I tipped back the carelessly heaped panels, one after another. The thrill of touching them was beyond my understanding.

  The painter bustled hospitably. Linda circled his every step. He started the muffle furnace and set a can of food in it to warm up. He opened the bin and leaned into it, head and all; at one point his feet even left the floor. His face was red when he climbed out.

  “Don’t tell me they’ve taken it!” His face expressed grave anxiety. Again he disappeared in the bin. Tattered clothes came flying out. Empty, crumpled icon frames and tin cans hit the floor with one and the same sound. “O Lord!” came his sigh of relief. “Who’d’ve guessed it was buried so deep!”

  He hauled himself out, with a bottle of Russkaya vodka.

  Standing there with a dark, barely discernible “Saviour” in my hand, I shared his unfeigned joy. “But who buried it?”

  “I did!” he said happily.

  The canned goods warming up in the muffle furnace, however, were not for Linda.

  I can’t begin to convey how much I liked it here with him! And how scary it was. Who could have known I would tumble out of my ordinariness and grayness, for no reason at all, just like that, into the present. Such an unexpected hole … The stool had been spread with newspaper. Very cozily, with efficient masculine deliberateness and functionality, he laid out our feast. Bread, an onion, canned stew … the sparkle of two washed glasses … the broad-shouldered bottle, standing like a small bell tower.

  “I suspected you right away,” he said, pouring the vodka. “What a pile over there, and you immediately pulled out the most valuable one.”

  I happened to be holding the same dark panel with which I had been caught when he finally found his stash. But I did not confess.

  “Stand it on the chair, take a better look.”

  Thus we sat down to a bottle of vodka, the three of us, not counting Linda: Pavel Petrovich (that was the landscape painter’s name, after all), myself, and our darkened Saviour, facing us on a separate chair. Pavel Petrovich, perhaps because of his profession, saw no sacrilege in this, and I noticed none at the time.

  Pavel Petrovich was not eating his bread but dunking it in the stew gravy and feeding it to Linda.

  “It wasn’t pride, you know, that made me say I’m not an artist. I go there with a completely different purpose. I’m making contact! Do you understand?”

  As yet, or already, I didn’t quite.

  “I’m seeking my place. Not my own in particular; that doesn’t greatly concern me. But man’s place! You’ll never find man in a landscape. One good thing about Shishkin is, I don’t think he ever put in a single man.”

  “He put in bears,” I interjected.

  “But that’s the candy!”{17} Pavel Petrovich decided peremptorily.

  “And by the way, he didn’t paint the bears himself. What—don’t you know who did it? … Once even Ayvazovsky couldn’t resist. Granted, he didn’t do it himself, either. But he asked someone to put in Pushkin for him—”

  “He asked Repin,” I said, boldly moving my pawn against his bears.

  “You should do crosswords,” he said, unscathed. “Whoever! And they failed! How wonderful that is! Pushkin stands there out of place, painted even worse than the sea, wearing a grin and holding his top hat away from him. But Pushkin himself, our dear one, our genius … how well he himself did all this, in his own painting! ‘Farewell, free element’{18}—and that’s it, he’s gone. All that remains is the gesture, the sweep of his hand. A brilliant standard of taste and pictorial accuracy. Me, all I see when I paint is my own nose. Sometimes I’m tempted to put it in, when the picture’s a failure … And it’s always a failure .. He waved away his thought as if brushing off a fly, and frightened Linda. “But every time, I don’t paint it!”

  “Your nose?”

  Linda left him and rested her calf-like head on my knee. This was the first time in my life I’d had anything to do with such a big dog. What a terrifying, though pleasant, weight lay on my knee! In a second she could bite in half the hand that was stroking her—

  “She’d never bite,” Pavel Petrovich said. I didn’t have to say anything to him, he obviously read my mind. “All right. Let’s le
ave the deplorable examples aside. Let’s take something that will stand up for itself. Bruegel, now. His Icarus. Remember?”

  I didn’t quite, but I nodded.

  “Not the Younger—the Elder. You won’t trap me on that. What does he have in his landscape that comes from man? Granted, a divine man. The heel! He has Icarus’s heel! You’d never notice it—”

  “But what about the plowman?” With his help, I had recalled the whole painting. “The plowman is there, plowing with all his might. Close up!”

  “The plowman! The plowman, he says! Of course there’s a plowman, a plowman is part of the landscape. He is also, please note, seen from the back. Almost faceless. His identity doesn’t matter—that’s the point. So he’s in harmony, because he’s a part of all this.”

  “There’s a ship, too. That’s not nature, either.”

  “A creation is already nature! It’s beautiful, a sailing vessel. Though less appropriate in the painting than the plowman. Now, you yourself have noted all the points: the plowman, the ship, and Icarus’s heel. Best to plow, sail if you must, but don’t fly!”

  “But that’s a fable already, not a painting,” I objected.

  “In this case! In this case, it’s both. In and of itself, the painting in a Bruegel will never disappoint you, and the thought process—yes, in this case it’s literary. After all, that’s how they did it then, they told a story. But they didn’t forget the art of painting … And its laws were operative. Man as an individual, as goodness knows what—as the king, if you please, of nature—cannot be fitted into a landscape. You’ll never find such a thing. The heel, only the heel. Or the landscape painter’s nose, which he isn’t obliged to draw. Far more plausible and appropriate, if you’re laying claim to eternity, to stick your ugly puss through a hole that has the sea and a cypress painted around it. That’s plausible. But any attempt to paint the individual as an organic part of the landscape will be a wretched parody.”

  He stopped for breath, pleased with the way he had stated all this.

  “I never thought!” He wagged his head delightedly.

  “Which?”

  “This is the first time I ever understood about Bruegel.”

  “Yes, it’s good,” I agreed. “But what to do with a Renaissance portrait? It necessarily has distance, depth, perspective, fields and views and hills and waters—”

  “That’s entirely different! What does it have in the foreground? A person, a face, an individual. Necessarily an individual! We sense this. We don’t know who he was, when he lived, what he did—but he’s an individual! Without fail. And only back there, in the distance, do we see where the individual came from, what world. It’s a separate world! The co-o-ordinate!” He always spoke that way, with an extra o. “The coordinate of the person! … It’s like a painting back there. The necessary window, the necessary frame for the second painting. The portrait is one thing, and the landscape is another. It’s all very separate and extremely conventional. The antiquity of it is what gives us the illusion of realism.”

  I clinked glasses, completely agreeing with him.

  “Stand on the seashore like Pushkin, or on the edge of the plowland, gazing into the radiant future … Or like today, when you came up to me, if I hadn’t ruined the view for you … What would you have seen and where would you have been?”

  I pondered.

  “Well?”

  “It was as if I weren’t there.”

  “See? You’re right, at last. Now we’re getting close to the truth. Where is man? who is man? and why is man? That’s what I’m concerned with, every time, when I try to reproduce what I see. I’m making contact.”

  “With whom?”

  “It’s obvious with whom,” he said angrily. “If only with world thought. You don’t see yourself when you look. And what you see doesn’t see itself, does it? Well, earthly creatures see in order to satisfy their daily needs. But trees, grasses, mountains, rivers? They don’t see. Haven’t you ever imagined yourself a stone or a branch? Of course you have. You’ve fastened yourself to the spot, situated yourself in space … And when you did this you were depressed by the meagerness of the world that fell to your lot for observation. Each time, without noticing, you continued to see, and even hear, as though a stone or a branch had eyes and ears. You couldn’t possibly deprive yourself of them in your imagination, it didn’t even enter your head, did it, now?”

  “I haven’t imagined myself as a stone all that often, but you may be right … Not without eyes.”

  “Imagine, what ni-i-i-ight!” He howled the word “night” in such a ghastly way … “What unfathomable selflessness there is in that blind, deaf, mute existence! Why, all things that exist are connected among themselves, without knowing of the connection. But we see it—in a unity which none of the participants in that unity knows! You come out to the shore: water splashing, sand, reeds, the forest reflected in the water—you know they don’t think as you do, of course, but you can’t even imagine how isolated the stones and waters are. For them, there is no whole! They exist entirely in themselves! Like the things in German philosophy. But there is a whole! That’s the paradox. You haven’t invented it, and it’s no illusion: everything we see forms a picture. So someone … No. Then the picture was … No. How could a separate thing, by itself, have become connected? And beauty—beauty is no illusion. Our aesthetics does not, by any means, result from the satisfaction of our vital needs. I spent a winter freezing in the tundra. Nothing out there was suited for any kind of life. I was perishing—in beauty. So who-o-o-o then?!” And again, he howled the word “who” in a ghastly way.

  “If you mean the Creator,” I stammered, “I’m not at all opposed to—”

  “Hateful man!” Pavel Petrovich snarled.

  “But why? I believe, too … ”

  “Too … ” he echoed venomously, destroying me completely. “But I don’t mean you. You’re a decent fellow, if you do think a lot of yourself. He’s the one I hate!”

  “Who?”

  “Man! Man with a capital letter{19} … The crown of Creation. He gets into everything, everything’s his, everything’s for him! Why, he’s worse than any animal. Worse. Because in place of a pig’s snout he invents all kinds of diggers, from the spoon to the atom. And gobbles, gobbles, gobbles. But to stop, or look around, or notice—”

  “True, true,” I nodded. “I agree with everything. But if you believe in Creation—”

  Pavel Petrovich darkened. “There’s no other hypothesis.”

  “—then man, too, is a creation. But in that case, for what purpose? The crown of creation—this may be something man has said of himself, although to all appearances the book wasn’t written by man, either … But after all, he’s even ‘in the image and likeness’—”

  “My, how you pick up on things!” On his lips, this was dubious praise. “Very quick. A truly civilized man—that’s what you are!” The blood rushed to my head in an unconquerable wave of shameful recollection. It had nothing to do with Pavel Petrovich … In what grade had we studied the author who wrote of that “Man with a capital letter”? To wit: “ ‘What will I do for the people!’ shouted Danko{20} … ” No. “The grass snake crawled high into the mountains … ” Again no! “With a cry, the stormy petrel soars like black lightning, now touching her wing to the wave … ” That was it! “The silly penguin fearfully hides his fat body in the cliffs … ” “One-sixth of them had formed a square in the grove and were gaily playing”—no, that was already something else, more human, about monkeys … Anyway, our literature teacher came down sick, and the substitute from District Education was an especially prominent woman, with a monstrous bust … Well, it’s just that when we sat scribbling in our notebooks and she walked among the desks, first the shadow of her bosom would lean over the notebook from afar, then the bosom itself, our little head would be lost in that heaving bosom, and only with difficulty, somewhere above, could we make out the peculiar caress in her eyes and the cooing of her bosomy voice �
�� This was in a year when I was still just a happy child. My brother was already studying at the university and getting A’s. He had splendid handwriting and exemplary lecture notes. As it turned out (this amuses me now), both he, as a sophomore or junior, and I, as a seventh- or eighth-grader, were studying the same thing, the “silly penguin.” I had peeked at his lecture notes just the night before, and they told, not for grade school but for college-level comprehension, what Gorky had meant by every animal—the penguin was a Constitutional Democrat, I think, or a Socialist Revolutionary. And now our high-bosomed substitute was asking a difficult question to awaken the initiative of the class, a “killer” question (she was probably finishing up at the same university) about these very animals, about the allegory. Well, no one knew, everyone hung back, because the question was posed in such a way that only the teacher could answer it. I, who never showed initiative, was the only one to raise my hand (which the Gospel would tell me to cut off), in order to impress her … I should mention that whenever she asked such a thing she had an encouraging, domineering way of saying, “Think, think!” So everyone’s thinking, and I raise my hand. She smiles indulgently, ready to hear my naive childish guess, and I blurt out, as written, the words accidentally seen and accidentally remembered—but who would have believed how fortunately! Blurt them out as my very own guess. The woman must have been surprised, but I was too embarrassed to remember her reaction very well. She went on to develop an idea “which I had suggested to her.” And then when we were all copying it down and she was pacing the aisle, my head was suddenly between her breasts. She was hugging me from behind, patting my head, and saying, “You have a good little head on your shoulders … a good little head … ” But the earth did not swallow me even then, although the infrequent situations of this sort are probably the ones in which the earth does swallow people, nor did it swallow me just now, when I suddenly pulled this out from under a thick mass of subsequent shames … nor did it when I recounted the whole memoir to Pavel Petrovich.