by Andrei Bitov
“Pull!” he shouted at last, in the echoing barrel. And there he stood, red-faced and triumphant, holding two cymlin squash. Brine dripped from his hands.
“Where are we?” I ventured at last.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Pavel Petrovich said in surprise. “But it’s obvious! What, haven’t you ever visited a pickle plant?”
Something dreadful, like a smile, illuminated the sullen face of the sage Simyon, and I realized what and whom all this reminded me of. The Three Musketeers. The headsman of Lille! This greeting from my favorite author touched my heart, and my delight knew no bounds.
“And Simyon?” I asked politely, accepting the second glass.
Simyon looked away, grinding his teeth and flickering his jaw muscles.
“This isn’t his line,” Pavel Petrovich said, pouring. “He’s above it.”
We clinked glasses. I lifted mine in obsequious salute to our hospitable host. He flickered his jaw muscles again and said nothing.
Why was he so disdainful of me? When I’d been warmly predisposed toward him, through Pavel Petrovich. I felt hurt.
I hardly even remember what happened at first, despite the music of the cymlins, but later I remember well. I hadn’t noticed where Simyon disappeared to. Well, yes, if this wasn’t his line … I kept wanting to ask what his line was, but I also kept forgetting. Pavel Petrovich kept talking, and his thought did not weaken:
“Another reason I’m hardly an artist: I want to understand everything, rather than depict it. An artist isn’t especially supposed to think. His eyes and hands think, his head keeps silent. He’s not supposed to think in words, at any rate. For me, though, if it’s not in words it’s not a thought. The artist thinks in images … You’ve heard that expression? But what kind of thought is that? It’s a rock painter’s thought. That’s who drew the beast, by the way! Pithecanthropus!”
“Cro-Magnon,” I said.
“Oh, yes, that’s the one. All true artists are Cro-Magnon men. That’s why they like smocks and long hair … to hide their tails. And their faces—did you ever notice? They all have these narrow, steep foreheads, their eyes are set deep in the sockets. It’s even truer with sculptors. They’re even more cavemanlike. By a couple hundred thousand years. They have bristles on their ears, on their shoulders, on their backs. Without fail! The hairy man Yevtikhiev … you’re too young to have seen him … in the old science textbook … when I was little I thought he was a sculptor. That’s why they like to sculpt nudes, because nudes look like real people to them, without the fur … I don’t care for them, to tell the truth. Do you think I say this in envy? You’re thinking: He’s a failure—”
I wanted to say I wasn’t thinking that, but to my surprise I only heard myself bleat. Pavel Petrovich understood me in his own way and filled our glasses anew.
“I wouldn’t trade thought for anything! Not even for their genius. Although,” he said bitterly, “thought is lethal!”
I wanted to ask why, but could not.
“I’ll tell you why, right now,” he said, munching on a cucumber. “This is a great thought. We are born into a world that is not boundless, isn’t that so? Gradually we come to know it. Swaddled, we look around with our baby eyes and see our mother. She’s the whole world. Then the world grows to be the size of the room, the house, the street. Then we become convinced that we can never get to the end of it. Then they explain to us about the globe, about continents and countries, about the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. And, having taught us things beyond our power to conceive, they train us to substitute words for concepts. They don’t so much convince us that the world is boundless as that our opportunities to know are boundless. We don’t yet understand or know everything, they say, but we know more now than we used to, and eventually we’ll begin to know even more, and then one day we’ll know practically everything … The man with the capacity to think begins using that capacity to strive ever onward, ever further, and this is stronger than a drug, let me tell you. You may not get free of a drug, never mind an idea … You may stay there. Like Simyon … ”
(I looked in the direction he had nodded in, and where Simeon was not.)
“A former commando. He stayed where they landed him … And there he began to shoot up. Got hooked. Now he needs nothing … They explain to us that oxygen, water, and food are necessary for life, and this, too, will be true, because that’s how it is … They explain that life on earth is the rarest of miracles, because the combination of conditions making it possible is unique and unrepeatable in the cosmos, that life’s range is phenomenally narrow, that we’ll perish the instant we lack a degree of warmth, a gulp of air or water. This, again, is true. And only our consciousness, if you please, is as omnipotent and boundless as the world … You don’t see the incongruity? Not yet? Let me explain. What we live in, what we see, perceive, and comprehend, what we call reality, is also a range, beyond whose bounds we perish in the same way that we freeze to death or suffocate. We think that our reality is boundless, that we just haven’t come to know the whole of it yet, if you please. In actual fact, however, our reality is that same range, no wider than the diapason we hear or the spectrum we see. We are alive only within this range. And we live only in this range, we don’t live in reality at all, only in a layer of reality, which, as a matter of fact, if we were capable of imagining its real proportions, is no thicker than a layer of paint. That’s where we live, in the oil-paint layer on which we were painted. And the painting is beautiful, for what an artist painted it! What an artist! Leonardo is as incomparable to Him as … as … Even the comparison with Him is incomparable! He painted for us the life whose structure we’re unraveling little by little—unraveling in the literal sense as well … ‘So stone by brick we tore that factory down … ’{24} We putter around, crawling on our layer, all the while thinking we’re penetrating deep inside. We don’t have the power to understand that deep inside there’s a reality not ours at all, not allotted to us, certainly not given to us in sensation … that the structure of our life has another structure of its own, which is certainly not located inside our life. Newton’s law is not confined in the apple, nor Archimedes’ law in the bath. The layer of life that was painted for us has a structure which in turn is a layer of reality, which in turn has a structure that is lodged, not in that layer, but in yet another, or in several, I don’t know how many more layers, which again wouldn’t explain anything to us even if we penetrated them. We had no mission to understand, our mission was to live! And it was beautifully—Lord, how beautifully!—incarnated. Now a thinking man existed, now an artist existed … The artist doesn’t understand. He mirrors. This is beautiful because all he can mirror is that which was already beautiful. But if in this process he also understands, if you please, then—assuming that he goes deep inside—he crosses through the layer. But the layer is thin, no thicker than paint, and what’s behind it? Behind it is the ground, behind that is the canvas, the foundation, and behind that is the abyss, a hole, torn edges, and then-—dust, darkness, a wall, with a nail and a string to hang himself by, an untalented signature with an inane title … No one but a painter understands painting, but believe me, true talent in painting will never go further than the mute guess that something does exist behind beauty. And yet, the thinking fool will go there. There they all are—Leonardo, El Greco, Goya, van Gogh … they all went beyond the range, beyond the bounds of representation, and found nothing but madness beyond those bounds … Cezanne .. And again his face twisted in pain, as from toothache.
“But what about Cezanne?” I said with sudden clarity, and marveled at my metallic voice.
“What about Cezanne? Nothing, really. He had never been a normal person. You don’t know a thing about painting anyway. So let’s don’t talk about him. Let’s take an artist of the word. Who has come closest to painting in words?”
“Gogol.” Here I had no doubt.
“Right. But he knew nothing about painting … Well, and what happened to him next? See? The same thing. He
exhausted the layer of reality that the Lord had assigned for him to mirror, he crossed through that layer and went beyond the bounds of representation. Out there, something else begins—out there is faith. But what faith did Cro-Magnon man have when he was worshipping what he saw? Where faith is, the artist is no more. The artist can’t understand this, because he’s also an addict, because art isn’t just the image of life, it’s a way of life … Those of us who aren’t geniuses always have something to prevent us from becoming geniuses: laziness, sluggishness, society, sins … And there’s no way we can admit that what prevents us is instinct, the fear of death and the thirst for life. Unconsciously we’re afraid of tumbling out of the layer of reality, we want to stay alive. But we’ll never understand this, because we’ll never concede we aren’t geniuses. We have been prevented. Period. The artist’s crisis is not circumstances. There are always circumstances popping up to turn you from your path. The crisis is that you’ve come to the edge of the only layer in which an image can be depicted, and now you want to paint invisible objects in visible colors. No one’s advice or prescriptions will help you, no asceticism, no heroic feat. Anything is easier than to continue to paint life, which just now seemed alive and capable of representation—and was indeed alive, and simply remained alive forever for some people, because they laid no claim. It’s easier not to drink, not to smoke, to stay away from women, everything that other people are too weak to deny themselves is easier than to paint what comes next after the image you’ve already depicted. He painted the landscape for us, painted us in it, but how He managed to do this is not for us to understand. The genius moves with cosmic speed in his understanding, and he tears a hole in the image. The sincerity of his bewilderment and despair is equaled only by the blindness or muteness that befalls him. His guess as to the structure of the world—if it doesn’t drive him out of his mind—will strike him quite dumb. The fate of the genius is a cosmic catastrophe, not in the sense that we pity him on a cosmic scale, or that it has a cosmic effect on us, not in the sense that he would have given us something good if only he hadn’t gotten trapped in the denser layers, but in the sense that he and the cosmos have a common nature. All our geniuses have exploded and scattered like dust, just as our dear earth is about to do. Humankind is close to a catastrophe on the same scale that every genius has suffered. Except that the artist used to tumble through the canvas, while these people go beyond the frame itself: they’re exhausting the landscape on the very surface of the layer. Everything was made for us so that we would live and live out our lives. No more, and no further. Further is death. First the death of the lives we’ve lived, then of ourselves as well. There was as much as we needed of everything. Which means, no more than we needed. Not a whole lot. Just so much. The supply of temptation included. Lord, when will they realize that it’s gone—gone? There is no more. No more! Where can I get it for you, when there isn’t any more!” Pavel Petrovich screamed at me. “God had it figured, down to the last man. Next comes the inspector general. The inspector general’s coming! And the inspector general is—the devil.”
The might of this idea knocked me dead, though I should mention we had also killed the bottle.
“I don’t believe in the devil,” I said, suddenly resisting.
“What?!” exclaimed Pavel Petrovich—and Simyon, who came flying in from I don’t know where.
“I mean, I believe in the Creator, in Christ,” I babbled, hemmed in by the two sages. “I believe in them as a reality, that they existed … exist … But not that the devil exists the way they do. No.”
“He doesn’t believe,” Simyon whispered to Pavel Petrovich in fright. “Then what does he believe in??”
“Listen to him, listen,” Pavel Petrovich said.
“But the air is swarming!” Simyon flapped his sleeves like a panicked cock, gesturing around at the space where we were.
I recoiled. Pavel Petrovich treacherously nodded agreement.
“Swarming with what?” I said angrily.
“Invisible beings!” He looked around as if in terror.
“I don’t believe in the other world, either!” I said stubbornly.
“What do you mean?!” Simyon, it seemed, was dumbstruck.
Pavel Petrovich was observing us with some interest.
“Just what I say,” I said maliciously.
“But if this world exists,” Simyon said, his voice suddenly mild and ingratiating, “the other does, too.”
“Listen to him, listen,” Pavel Petrovich said, delightedly backing him up.
“Like a magnet—you can’t cut it in half,” Simyon said.
“Like light and darkness!” Pavel Petrovich exclaimed.
“Like life and death!” Simyon said, flickering his jaw muscles.
As though they had sentenced me, and now the time for my immolation had come … I was having trouble understanding. It seemed to me they had started speaking in some dead cave-language. Their words all hung in the air, the whole discussion, like an invisible, transparent pane, like a sheet of glass between them and me, with rain coursing down and thickening it, a transparent, viscous, fibrous downpour … Now the rat was there … now Simyon’s face would turn savage with kindness … now Pavel Petrovich’s face would become inspired and demoniacal, as though it, too, like the glass, had those weeping streams rolling down it … and now it would suddenly empty of significance, dissolve and wash away in the torrent, revealing the upturned nose and cantankerousness of Emperor Paul’s anti-profile{25} … At that moment especially, his small, dimming eyes would fill with an intelligence like madness, and Simyon would be gone again, without a trace …
“Who are you?” I kept asking Pavel Petrovich.
Who was he? …
“Not even one more rhinoceros! Why hasn’t there been even one more species since man appeared? And if we shudder with loathing at the sight of some spider or snake, which existed before we did and will outlive us, then what is the expression in the eyes of nature herself when she looks at us, what shudder runs over her skin? Can you imagine that look? At us?”
I was captivated by his intelligence, I was overwhelmed and overpowered by it, though I also had overmuch vodka sloshing around inside me … And here is why I was still on my feet. However greatly he swaggered, however long he talked, neither he nor I could alter our original situation: he was performing, and I was listening. And no matter how silent I remained—if only because I could say nothing on his level—I, too, was performing and could not retreat from my role, any more than from my supremacy of position: I was performing as the appraiser, the final instance, the technical inspector of his ideas, the quality-control inspector of his truths. One way or another, I was the person for whose sake he was talking … Something irreparable had once happened to him, there was something he hadn’t swallowed, hadn’t digested, something he hadn’t forgiven, to which he belonged without remainder and which he loved to distraction. His jealousy burned in everything … What was it he couldn’t bear? Culture, art, life itself? Or God Himself?
“The good things in life were not provided in Creation. The good things are the work of our own hands!” Pavel Petrovich’s voice rang with desperation. He was no longer closing in on his idea, he was fleeing from it, and it was chasing him. “Enough was provided so that we could fulfill our purpose. Love, death. End of program. Yet we imagine that our knowledge only begins when we abandon our program … But since knowledge, like God, is immeasurably greater than we are, neither greed nor appetite nor sensuality nor vanity will suffice for the man who begins to know. Neither Ecclesiastes nor Faust.”
Pavel Petrovich emerged through these names as though the downpour had ended, or had dissolved the glass pane. Suddenly I saw where we were. The dim light, the slimy gray walls, the garbagey cement floor. Floating in the barrel was a last huge cucumber, too long for the dipper. Its curious dull tip poked out like a little crocodile. One thing became irrevocably clear to me: we were indeed in the place where we stood, and his discour
se no longer seemed to me to be hyperbole. We were indeed on the other side of the layer he had talked about. With some doubt that it had ever happened, I could recall the landscape where we had met. The truth was here, and not there; the truth, which is to say reality, was this cucumber. Madness is not what we can imagine and be scared of, madness is when we’re already over there, and not here. We were on the other side, and Simyon was smiling at us, because what distorted his face was a smile. He was offering me the wrought-iron key to the church.
“You’ll forget again,” he said fondly.
Because we, it turned out, were about to leave.
“You’re stoned out of your mind!” Pavel Petrovich said admiringly to Simyon, who looked very sober to me. “You could’ve let me have a toke.”
With the same frightening and engaging mask of politeness, Simyon took from behind his ear an inordinately long cigarette and offered it to Pavel Petrovich.
I headed for the door we had entered by, picturing the same scrabble in the wall and then the long-desired gulp of air and sky … It turned out I had started the wrong way. We exited through a completely different door, and there was no need to scrabble anywhere—we found ourselves right in the street, on the other side of the citadel.
“Now we’ll go to a certain place,” Pavel Petrovich said.
“But where? It’s the middle of the night … ” Not that I was afraid. My flesh was. I consisted entirely of vodka, it quivered crystal clear inside me.
“We’re eagerly awaited.” Pavel Petrovich was peremptory, yet he seemed somewhat hesitant as to which way to go, right or left. He was privately weighing and deciding something.
We stood under a solitary streetlamp. The road curved around the streetlamp and went downhill, disappearing among close-ranked trees. Still thinking, Pavel Petrovich took out Simyon’s cigarette (this time from behind his own ear), then twirled it and sniffed it. He sniffed—I smelled the sweet flavors infused in the night air here: the combined fragrance of asphalt, leaves, grass, and fog was radiating warmth as it cooled. After one furtive puff in his sleeve, Pavel Petrovich handed the cigarette to me. I inhaled, and we set off.