The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  My, how that story tickled him!

  “No, no! You’re not hopeless at all. Not by any means,” he said, laughing. “I never guessed.”

  I didn’t think I’d been drinking, but the bottle was empty.

  “Well,” he declared, noting its total emptiness with gratified reproach, “I, too, give you an A. I don’t know how you came up with this, but you’ve managed to ask the most difficult question. You can’t imagine how I’ve struggled over this. The landscape has an answer for everything, even the purpose of man, but why ‘in His image and likeness’? No answer.”

  Now he was inspecting the bottom of his glass, turning it this way and that.

  “For what purpose, actually, is man created? This, too, is a very painterly question. Why are artists, too, called creators? Hyperbole, of course; ‘master’ was better … You can’t possibly call an artist a creator in the full sense. At best he has re-created, not created. But isn’t the Creator—although the term by no means describes Him fully—also the greatest of artists? … ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ And strictly speaking, not even the Word, but Logos, knowledge. Then the image of the world existed prior to the world, prior to the act of creation? And it wasn’t just an image of the world, it was even divine … The image was God! Do you see what we’re dealing with? An artist. Always the image comes first, and then the painting. This is the foundation of aesthetics. But the painting, you know, is always for someone—for someone who’s capable of understanding or appreciating. Well, let’s concede that our appreciation doesn’t matter to Him. He’s above that … But no, I don’t believe that our appreciation doesn’t matter! Not because we’ll praise, but because we’ll understand! To be understood, to be not alone—that is the point of Creation, as also of artistic creation. He was not engaged in pure art, we must suppose. No one ever has been, if we probe deeply. Art for art’s sake is pride, humiliation more than pride … Everyone who creates yearns for understanding. Then isn’t it obvious? What is man’s origin, what is man for? To see Creation! Not only to use it and be part of it, like all God’s creatures, but to see it! That is, to understand and comprehend it. This, we must suppose, is the reason why He created us ‘in His image and likeness’, .. Otherwise it’s incomprehensible. Why make man ‘in His image and likeness,’ for what purpose? The Creator Himself can’t have idolized Himself, that He copied the crown of Creation from His own self?”

  He upended his glass conclusively, as proof. “But for whom is a painting created? Oh, an ordinary painting?”

  “The people,” I said. “People,” I elaborated, again imprecisely.

  “The customer!” Pavel Petrovich cried.

  “But who is the customer of God Himself?” I asked in great surprise.

  “The world’s image that existed before the world? But that’s just a guess … It’s not right, but … After all, the customer comes before the artist, doesn’t he?”

  He exulted as though he had supplied the answer not to me, this time, but to God Himself.

  I had no reply for him. I could only nod.

  “If I had been able to pose the question that way,” I said profoundly, “that’s exactly the way I would have posed it.” Privately, though, I was solving a problem: I was translating the proof of port into the proof of vodka, in order to check the vodka equivalent of the amount Pavel Petrovich had drunk. I had almost figured it out, but I wasn’t sure about the last fifty grams. Had the port been 0.75 liter or 0.8? Right in the middle of those fifty grams, as I calculated it, lay the boundary between less than a liter and more than a liter.

  “There’s a very curious hypothesis about this,” Pavel Petrovich said dreamily. “Not a hypothesis, even. A myth. But I’m afraid we’re not up to it.”

  Judging by the haste with which I took offense for my mental capacities, my older friend had already drunk his liter—

  “You misunderstand me,” Pavel Petrovich said affectionately, reading my mind. “I meant myself, not you. My dog money’s all gone.”

  How I rejoiced at this turn of events! I simply hadn’t dared to propose it myself. But I had money—I did! Though mine, too, was a little like “dog money.” Shoes for the baby, perhaps, or … I no longer remember. Who cares! I had, have, will have money! “But where will you buy it at this hour?”

  “Not to worry,” Pavel Petrovich said. “This will be enough,” he said, taking a five from me. (I had pulled out three of them, all the money I had.) “This will be enough,” he said, taking the second five as well, and keeping an attentive and solicitous eye on the third one lest I drop it past my pocket.

  He wasn’t staggering at all. Somehow he was even steadier on his feet, and gentler, as if the floor had become earthen. Without hurrying, he tidied everything up. He didn’t forget to turn off the muffle furnace, either; I needn’t have worried. The Saviour “not made by human hands” was put back against the wall, after first being kissed by Pavel Petrovich.

  “When you’re doing restorations,” I said, fearful of asking an imprecise question, “do you also … make … contact?”

  “Of course,” he said, standing the panel against the wall at precisely that moment. “But it’s different. However good the icon, even if ‘not made by human hands,’ it was painted by a man. Unlike Creation itself. Out there I’m in contact with the Creator.” He said this as lightly as if boarding a streetcar or entering an office. “In here, with a man’s faith, sometimes true, sometimes not. Sometimes”—and now he became thoughtful—“even with my own faith.”

  Order had been restored, in the sense that no vestiges remained. We passed behind the bin and through a small door leading nowhere. The doomed, human sigh of the Great Dane, whom we left behind, echoed at our backs in a new darkness.

  We were plunged into the depths of the Middle Ages. The depths were literal, stony, and cramped. Or had I grown considerably broader in the shoulders, and taller? My shoulders scraped the walls, my head counted the invisible beams. Climbing a steep little staircase, I suddenly saw above me a star. The fresh night air burst into my cellar lungs. We found ourselves on top of the wall that surrounded the citadel. Standing on it, one could especially appreciate its thickness. We paused there, emphatically breathing in and out. This was a boundary. On one side all was silent, coalescing in the night. The monastery buildings, invisible, huddled there rubbing their plump white flanks together and breathing—only the peaked bell tower could still be made out. On the other side, chains of streetlamps extended into the distance, a car honked, windows glowed at regular intervals in the hulking orderliness of the adjacent neighborhood … The gulp of air was like a genial glass.

  This platform called for a speech addressed to nowhere. Pavel Petrovich took the floor.

  “And behold, He created him … ” Pavel Petrovich glanced to the left and then began gazing to the right: the dark of the monastery and the light of the new development. “He created the landscape and added man … Ayvazovsky’s mistake! You know something funny? In this case, too, He may not have been the one who added the man, eh?”

  “So who did?” I looked to the right and left.

  “It’s a secret for now,” Pavel Petrovich said, his slyness gleaming in the night. “My secret. Or rather, a guess, a hint … I’ll tell you. But not right away.”

  “I understand,” I said, or perhaps nodded. More likely nodded.

  “What you understand doesn’t matter, what matters is that you’ll understand later,” he said rather ominously. “Judge for yourself. The world was completely ready when man appeared in it. Man created nothing in it. He didn’t make the landscape. What he did make he made badly, he spoiled. You’ll say that telegraph poles, rails, and airplanes became part of the landscape long ago. Precisely: became! The wild animal carries a bullet under his skin—and never mind, he lives, with a slight limp. Man didn’t create the landscape, but neither did he create the conflagration. Again, neither the desert nor the ashes are the work of his hands, they merely exist where he is. Not by hi
m are the weeds sown, not by him is the sand whipped into dunes. The unity he has destroyed in the landscape is merely a breach through which that unity’s laws, which he did not establish, can operate. The surgeon cuts, but who will heal the wound, clot the blood, leave the scar? Who leaves the scar on God’s Creation? You will say man—and you will be a thousand times wrong. Man inflicts the wound, the scar is from God. Man!” he howled. “The only word that means nothing!”

  “I beg your pardon? But then—”

  “Is there anything in this world that can name itself?”

  “Why, no,” I faltered.

  “There’s our word! ‘Whyno.’ What’s wrong with that as a name for man? Does the moon somehow name itself? Does the pine? Does the cow say, ‘I am a cow’? They have no language, you will claim. But life, existence—are they not language, are they not expression? We are given the language of words so that we may name everything. The stone cannot say of itself that it’s a stone, but we will speak for it. And who will speak for us? … ‘I,’ said Adam after the Fall; ‘thou,’ said Cain to Abel; ‘he,’ said his descendant, of another descendant; ‘I am he,’ Christ reminded us all. But where is the word ‘man’ here? Man is but a pronoun: I, thou, he, they, and finally we. And if he’s not a pronoun but man, and with a capital besides, this crown of Creation, climax of evolution, this navel of the earth—then he’s merely the agent of erosion, corrosion, putrefaction, every kind of oxidation … The stress of nature.”

  But art? I wanted to say.

  “What of art … ?” He waved a hand. “Man didn’t create art, either. Although this is a uniquely permissible way of stretching the point in order to call him a creator or founder, if only with a small letter. What does art prove? That the highest creation of human hands has consumed almost no material. What has been spent on canvas, paint, paper, and ink? For this, nature suffices in abundance. For engendering yet another nature.”

  Pavel Petrovich was terrible and beautiful. As though he stood on a mountain.

  “And you know what? Do you know what? Creative work doesn’t even require any time! Man does not know time when he creates … When he loves … ” He sighed. “In the face of death, he will discover that he has destroyed all his remaining time—that is, consumed it, that is, he’s destroyed himself, and now he’s dead. Time!” he howled. “Who are you? Are you man, perhaps? Is man, perhaps, a sort of larva, vermin, a landscape moth? Time’s larva, death’s chrysalis? The way the pharaohs were bandaged? Isn’t that true, that they lie like chrysalises? The pyramids are monuments to death … All attempts to immortalize, to endure beyond the brackets of time, will prove monuments to death. Fear is already a cult. Everything here will outlive me, you see. ‘Everything, even the dilapidated birdhouses … ’{21} We are indulgent toward the landscape, but only toward the kind that’s mortal, along with us—the birdhouses, too, will fall apart soon enough, catching up with us … What we don’t like is worms. Worms. Oh my God, the worms, oh my God, the worms … ” he muttered. “It’s beginning … ” he said darkly.

  “What’s beginning?”

  “Time, damn it! Vodka ends—time begins. They flow across. No gap there. Same thing. Time flows, too. The language—the language says it all. Now to open this crypt … ”

  Soundlessly, powerfully, a rancid slice of moon broke through a dark cloud. Pavel Petrovich’s eyes blazed toward the moon with a matching light. All unexpectedly, he was dead drunk. With a last, heroic effort he shook himself out of his lethargy. A convulsive shudder ran over his whole body, articulating its disjunct, molten, and fused parts.

  “Let’s go!” he said decisively, and started to descend as if a trapdoor had opened under him.

  There were steep steps in front of him, it turned out, and they led into the thickness of the wall. By now, only his head remained above, once more illuminated by the moon, whose smell was fading; the head turned to me, its general shape reminiscent of … The black ball lay abandoned on top of the wall, John the Baptist’s head never did roll off the charger … The head summoned, and I had no strength to move, no strength to follow him … I glanced about for the last time. At my right, asleep forever, was the monastery. At my left, glass and concrete, the city of the future smoldered in life’s embrace, the last charred brand of a universal bonfire … The moon burst into laughter again. Stirring ominously, like dead men come to life, the monastery buildings closed in … I turned my head one last time in the fresh air and disappeared underground. One last star flashed above me, as if it had fallen.

  “Careful!” came Pavel Petrovich’s caressing voice. “Give me your hand … Here’s my hand!” His hand proved unexpectedly alive, strong, and warm. “That’s the way. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  We moved through this catacomb with increasing confidence. There was even something life-affirming and optimistic in our progress, as though there might be light ahead.

  “Well, what’s so disagreeable about a worm?” His voice, accompanying me, sounded confident and sober again. “Why isn’t a spider pretty? But man dislikes, sees as unaesthetic, finds especially ugly the very things that will outlive him. Outlive not the individual, actually, but outlive man himself, outlive his very species … The reminder makes him wince. Weeds, barren ground, cockroaches, flies. They tell him over and over: You will not be, you will not be! … Pah, they’ve blocked it up.”

  Here I bumped into Pavel Petrovich, because he, in turn, had collided with something. This was a dead end. And it was dark! I raised my outspread hand to my eyes—and couldn’t see it.

  “We’re here!” Even his voice became more cheerful.

  Is he going to do me in, or what? I thought, equally cheerfully, and at the same time touched my useless eye. My eyelashes twitched under my hand with independent life: I was utterly unafraid, but a voluptuous wave of affection for my independent, self-contained existence ran down my spine … Pavel Petrovich kicked the obstacle, and it gave forth a joyful, booming response.

  “Semyo-o-on! Simyo-o-on!” he shouted, drumming.

  It was a door. What more could it lead to?

  “Co-o-ming!” an unfriendly voice said at last, from the other side.

  I thought I heard a sigh of relief from Pavel Petrovich: Thank God.

  “Who’s there?” My voice sounded scared, which surprised and wounded me.

  “Oh, that’s … ” Pavel Petrovich shifted impatiently from foot to foot. “A great man … Head and shoulders above us. A sage!”

  “But who is he?” I insisted.

  “Semyon? Just … a hermit.”

  “Well!” This was fabulous! “Is he Semyon or Simyon?”{22}

  “I don’t know for sure. We’ll ask him in a minute.” Pavel Petrovich pounded on the door again. As if someone had been standing behind it all this time, a bolt clanked, a hook rattled, tin squealed, a sharp blade of light slashed from the crack.

  The blinding fifteen-watt bulb illumined a white rat on a man’s shoulder. Simyon was a tall, crudely hinged peasant. His long, taciturn face—now the jaw, now the forehead—stuck out beyond the picture frame; he wore a smeared apron and smelled of paint. Pavel Petrovich took the wordless peasant’s elbow and drew him deep inside, leaving me to look around. The cellar was extensive, its far end hidden in darkness. Down the middle, in two rows, huge barrels had been set in cement and covered with heavy lids. The complex and powerful aroma of acid and of briny dankness (as if a sea had died here) did not fit with the paint smell trailing from Simyon. The two men went through yet another small door, where a truly brilliant light blazed. Simyon, brightly lit, glanced at me over the rat, as though verifying something Pavel Petrovich had whispered to him, and they both disappeared.

  I stood for a long time. They had forgotten about me. Or perhaps abandoned me? … At last I risked peeking in. They turned around as if caught, with suspiciously sober faces. In Pavel Petrovich’s hands was an extraordinarily fresh, bright icon; he seemed to be turning it this way and that. Simyon’s hands were otherwise occ
upied: in the right he held a small brush, in the left a gleaming half liter. Little tubes and bottles were clustered in working disarray on a small workbench, under a strong lamp, and the whole room was about the size of a barrel, which we wholly filled. Separately, on the only chair, stood yet another icon, which proved to be the very same Saviour with whom we had drunk. How had it come here? I hadn’t noticed Pavel Petrovich carrying anything in his hands.

  “Familiar?” he asked.

  I nodded. But that wasn’t what he meant, as it happened.

  “St. Cyril and St. Methodius,”{23} he said, turning a fresh icon toward me.

  “This is St. Cyril?” I asked, pointing in confusion.

  Pavel Petrovich grinned. “You guessed it.”

  I wanted to ask Simyon how it happened that he, too, was a restorer, but Simyon picked up two glasses and nodded to us to follow him.

  Nothing surprised me anymore—I was spellbound. Simyon set the bottle and glasses on a barrel. Leaning hard, he shoved the lid off the adjacent barrel. Out of nowhere a small scoop or dipper appeared in his hand, and he dipped it into the barrel. Pickled cucumbers, no less, splashed in the dipper like small fish. He emptied the dipper onto the lid, and they poured glossily down in a picturesque little heap.

  “If only we had some cymbals,” Pavel Petrovich said, rather voluptuously.

  “They’re gone.” These were the first words I had heard from Simyon.

  “What about from the bottom?”

  Simyon said nothing. He cocked his head to one side, as before, and seemed to study me.

  “I’ll go after them myself,” Pavel Petrovich begged.

  Reluctantly Simyon consented, and Pavel Petrovich headed for the third barrel. Its lid was off, and he began to rummage with the dipper, leaning down into the barrel the way he had recently rummaged in the bin—as though the barrel, too, held another bottle.

  “Hold my legs a minute,” we heard from the barrel.

  Simyon did not stir, and I was the one who went to hold his legs.