by Andrei Bitov
That is, I had the illusion we set off. Because the streetlamp set off with us too, for some reason, and the road followed along like an escalator … Pavel Petrovich, of course, was talking, but I was no longer taking it in. Every now and again I dropped out of his discussion into the neighboring darkness of the street. He would support me carefully by the elbow and guide me back to a course illuminated always by the same streetlamp.
His words flowed along that course like a stream, like poetry … But they were poetry!
“ ‘ … He himself looks very like an ape,’ ”{26} he declaimed.
I was enraptured, overwhelmed. “A wonderful line … ”
He flickered his jaw muscles and incinerated me with his glance. As though I had mentioned Cezanne …
“ ‘O vanity! And that’s your demigod, / That’s man: though master of all good, / Of art, of land and sea, of all the world God wrought, / He cannot live two days sans—’ … grub.” Pavel Petrovich cut himself short and scorched me again with his glance, as though I were the very embodiment of …
“Did you write that?” I guessed timidly.
Great sadness flooded his brow. He shook his head in unbearable suffering.
“He is ape and Pithecanthropus and Stone and Bronze and Golden and heathen and early Christian and atheist, the tenth century is neighbor to the first, and the first to the twentieth. He wears a necktie and a loincloth, carries a sling and a submachine gun, he is slaveholder, peasant farmer, bourgeois, and proletarian, Greek, Mongol, and Russian—all this simultaneously, all this now. Not to mention that he’s both woman and man … We judge by the top floor, which he added as recently as our own time, but we don’t know which of the floors is actually inhabited in our neighbor. Maybe the fellow driving the Zhiguli is a fifteenth-century Mongolian cavalryman, and maybe the fellow in jeans is a student at Plato’s Academy … We all bend over backward to be like one another, though we insist on our inconsequential differences as individuality … And no one can tell us who we are. What can you say about the age of a tree? … No, don’t saw it down to count the rings!” he interrupted me. “What barbarity! Each little cell of the tree is a different age. Isn’t the bottom branch older than the top branch? And isn’t a fresh leaf on the bottom branch younger than an old leaf on the top one?”
I didn’t know. I was standing in confusion before a wild torrent that had suddenly blocked our way. Pavel Petrovich solicitously helped me step across, for it was only a pathetic trickle leaking from a water-pipe coupling. He was now developing for my benefit a theory of the fragmentariness of life—as distinct from his layer theory, in which I already believed—and was extremely angry at the Creator.
“What a heap He built! Just think!” he said, with an urgent new intimacy. “No plan or supervision, helter-skelter, using whatever came to hand. We martyrs, we’re the ones who people it with logic and harmony, though they don’t come easily to us, for which we then blame ourselves. But it’s the most ordinary henhouse—just very elaborate, with annexes, stairs, and superstructures—passed off as a perfect building, since we can’t see any other. Bits and pieces—lumped together! But they’re all isolated, all isolated!” he shouted. “Unfinished, unpainted, carelessly basted together … Stop!” he cried exultantly. “That’s what’s alive, that’s what’s tremendous, that’s what’s great and divine—the basting! The thread is alive! It is the presence of God in Creation! Why didn’t I think of that before!” Pavel Petrovich wept, childishly rubbing the tears around his face.
“What is it? What is it?” I implored. “What’s wrong?” I kept asking, barely able to restrain my own tears.
“I’m sorry for God!” he said. With an abrupt, manly gesture he brushed away a traitorous tear, flickering his jaw muscles like Simyon.
I was taken aback. “Well, but … how can we help Him?”
“We’re the very ones who must!” Pavel Petrovich said with conviction. “He believes in us! We don’t believe in Him. He believes in us. Do you suppose it’s easy for Him? Look at us! This is what … ” And he started to cry again. “No, you don’t know! You don’t know!” he keened. “Why, He’s an orphan!”
“Simyon?”
“God is an orphan, blockhead! He’s the father of an only son, and He gave that son to us to tear to pieces. How could He, bereft of parental care from eternity, have subjected His only flesh-and-blood son to the same fate!”
This was the last thing I had expected! The drunkenness flew clean out of my head. At any rate, the streetlamp finally came uncoupled from me and stayed behind. Darkness thickened around me.
“Let me explain,” came Pavel Petrovich’s voice from the dark. “First, a question for you. Adam was created in His image and likeness. Can he be considered a son of God?”
My neck was somehow bobbing loosely in my collar. For some reason I thought an invisible huge hand was about to reach down from the sky, in the darkness, and easily tip my head back.
“He cannot!” Pavel Petrovich exulted. “Because he was created, not born! But Jesus was born! Jesus is a son. I read a heretical little book about this, can’t think of the author. You may feel satisfied with a creation, even proud of it, but that feeling can’t be called love. Only a dilettante can love his own creation—not a true creator. It’s impossible to love a creation, and impossible not to love a son. A creation may not satisfy you, but you could hardly correct something in it: once created, it doesn’t belong to its creator. Do you reread your books, can you correct so much as a misprint in all the copies? Do I enjoy looking at my own landscapes? … Such is the practical possibility of loving one’s creation and correcting it. The Creator can’t make contact with His Creation after it’s finished, however greatly it grieves Him. He can only destroy it. But after all, it’s alive! The Lord finds the only way: by separating Himself from Himself, by sending another self, His own son … He gives us His only and most precious child, so that the latter will finish what He Himself has been unable to do. Keep in mind, too, that not only Jesus is a man; the Creator, too, though He doesn’t descend to us, becomes a man, for He is the father of the man Jesus and thereby offers yet another sacrifice, deifying His Creation, adopting it. And then we, who were formerly a mere creation in the likeness of Him and His son, also become His children, for His son is our brother, through his mother and by blood. But, having become Jesus’ brothers, aren’t we older than Jesus? Adam is older than Jesus in time. And, like his sons—Cain was older than Abel and Cain slew Abel—didn’t Adam’s humankind become Cain, when we crucified God’s son, our own brother?”
We emerged in the light of the next streetlamp. I tipped my head back again, and now retribution spied us. I needn’t have looked up—retribution was not pursuing us from above, although possibly from on high.
Out of the darkness that we had left behind, a paddy wagon drew abreast of us and braked sharply. Two policemen leaped nimbly from the cab. One was already gripping my arm tightly above the elbow. The other raced past me and rustled heavily in the bushes, like a moose.
I looked back. The policeman boldly twisted my arm behind me. Ouch!
“Easy,” the policeman said.
“You go easy,” I said.
“No back talk!” he said.
“I’m not fleeing and I’m not resisting,” I said.
“True,” he said. “No place to frigging hide.”
And he smiled an open, childish smile. He himself was rather small, but his teeth were splendid and large. Why, I could take care of him, I thought, clutching the key to the church in my free hand. God saved me—I could even have killed him with a key like that.
“Give me the key,” he said then.
I gave it to him.
“Some key!” he said admiringly. “Where’d you get it?”
I couldn’t resist: “It’s my apartment key.”
The officer, fortunately, laughed instead of taking offense. He was gratified.
“Do tell,” he said, affirmatively and contentedly.
“Got a residence stamp?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“In Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
I named my street.
“You’re a long ways off. How will you get back?”
“By taxi.”
“You mean you’ve got the money?” He was sincerely surprised. “You didn’t drink it all up?”
“There’s enough left for a taxi.”
“Show me your residence stamp.”
“But I don’t carry my passport!” This has always infuriated me.
“Tough,” he said, but he let go of my arm.
This officer wasn’t bad. The other was worse. Panting, he crawled out of the bushes on the other side of the road. How had he flown across?
“Got away, the snake!” he said.
The fact that Pavel Petrovich had escaped gave me mixed feelings. On first thought, of course, I was glad for him. On second thought, it greatly surprised me that he was capable of such a thing. On third … Adam, Cain, Abel, I thought, and grinned, not without bitterness.
“Look,” said my officer, holding the key out to his colleague.
“Hm-m. yes,” drawled the other. “Where’d he get it?”
“He’s not saying,” mine reported, “and he’s got no passport.”
“Of course not,” said the other. “No residence stamp.”
I almost flew into a rage, but my officer backed me up: “He says he lives in Apothecary Lane.”
“Where’s that?”
“Near the three stations,” I said.
“Oh, you all live near the three stations.” They both started to laugh. “What about your friend, he live there too?”
“He’s no friend of mine.”
“What, never saw him before?”
“No.”
“How come you had your arm around him?”
“He was going the same way.”
“To the three stations?”
“Why, no, as far as the highway. I was lost, and he said he’d show me.”
The other officer nodded encouragingly to mine. “No simpleton, is he?”
“Doing fine! mine agreed.
“Lost, if you please. And where were you lost, if you even know?”
Now, that was the question! There he had me. That I didn’t know at all—where I was.
“Tell us where you’re coming from, at least,” mine prompted, as if he were really on my side.
“From the monastery.”
“From the monastery?! What were you doing there?”
“Taking communion.”
“That does it,” said the other. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
… You don’t have to believe me, but in the end they let me off. I hadn’t expected it of them. Still less had I expected it of myself.
I woke up sitting on an ordinary office chair, in quarters strangely unlike a prison cell. It was the kind of pen in which people keep small animals, like rabbits or, at the extreme, foxes. Through the wire partition that separated me from the duty room, I saw a peaceable policeman dozing at his post. Quartered alongside me, on a chair like mine, was a man I would never have expected here: a solid citizen. He wore an expensive-looking coat, with what I took to be a beaver collar; an astrakhan hat, which set off a very noble gray crew cut; delicate gold spectacles, which glittered fiercely … and he was asleep with his massive, very well-shaved chin resting on the (ivory!) knob of his equally massive cane.
“Awake?” I heard the policeman’s kind voice. “Come on out.”
He unlocked the grilled door to our cell.
“Come on out, don’t worry, we have nothing against you.” (Never in my life had anyone spoken to me so kindly!) “The major just got here, we’re going to let you go … Stay put! This doesn’t concern you!” he shouted menacingly at my dignified neighbor, who had made some move to follow me. “You’ll stay here with me!” The word “me” sounded thin and mosquitolike.
A model and example, I fluttered out of the cell like a little bird, with a censorious glance at my colleague, now already my ex-colleague. I had sobered up, of course, which surprises even me. True, I reeked! The major—clean-shaven, exemplary, with an athletic glow on his trim cheekbones and a university emblem in his buttonhole—squeamishly asked me not to come near and to talk from a distance. I managed to explain the whole thing to him … What I like about the movies is that I can tell the police I work in them. Then, of course, come questions I can answer—that is, questions turning into a conversation, into a chat. Not that the major had seen even one of the films made from my screenplays. But I did have, if not my passport, at least my union ID. And it corroborated my address, as well as my name. And I hadn’t been fighting or singing or shouting obscenities, I hadn’t put up any resistance. At the monastery, as it happened, I had been visiting some artist friends. And artists, of course—well, you understand … And this smell I had, it was just a misfortune—my digestion, sort of, or my liver. Drink a kopeck, stink a ruble.
“But why don’t you look after your health, if that’s the case?” the major said in parting.
“I can’t say I’ve abused it very often,” I lamented with blue-eyed innocence.
“But why didn’t they see you off?”
“They were drunk as skunks,” I said censoriously. “I didn’t have anywhere near as much to drink as they did.”
I had found the key, as it happened, in a village (a separate conversation about the village—where? what district? it turned out they were practically fellow countrymen). All rusty. The boys had restored it for me, I was going to hang it on my wall.
“Here, leave the key with us. But the Galsworthy that you promised you’d try and get (my wife’s really keen on him)—when you do get hold of it, drop in and see us, and I’ll return it to you.”
He actually tore out a used calendar page and wrote down his telephone number.
I had perked up so much that I even inquired what my bigwig cellmate had done.
“Don’t ask!” The major scornfully waved me off.
It was already morning, and not even very early. The sun was warm. The sky was blue. Lord! What happiness this was! To walk out of a detention cell, walk out unscathed, walk out to the air, to freedom—and besides have fine weather! I even felt young and fresh, as though I hadn’t gone beyond a liter yesterday but was peacefully returning from a morning swim or tennis game. To think in the direction of yesterday—never mind remember it—was loathsome and terrifying. The part of me that was alive, the only reason I still thought I wasn’t finished, was my self-righteousness. After all, how had I managed to persuade them? Why, only by believing the whole story myself. I walked out of there fully aware that justice triumphs, and specifically—this is especially characteristic—in my case. The man with the cane was cogent corroboration of this.
Hardly had the police station disappeared from view, hardly had I inhaled a chestful of air at last, convinced that yesterday’s fantastic horror simply hadn’t happened, that it was all an inflamed delirium, which I had fortunately overcome, conquered, and forgotten—when there was a determined tug at my sleeve. There stood Pavel Petrovich, drawn, sleepless, chilled to the bone.
“Don’t tell me they let you go?” he said in a whisper, glancing around. “I was sure you’d get fifteen days.”
“How’d you find out I was here?” I said, nonplused.
“Where else could they take you?”
“You’ve been waiting for me the whole time?”
“I wouldn’t have waited past eleven. The judge gets here by eleven.”
“What time is it now?”
“Exactly time for the store to open. Let’s go!”
Thus was I punished, and again from on high, for the self-righteousness that had so transfigured me just now! Already we were walking out of the store with two bottles, this time Kavkaz port, I think. Moreover, i
t was his treat again—that was the surprising thing. For he still had my fives, intact, and he hadn’t bought the vodka from Simyon at all, Simyon had owed it to him … Now, squinting at the daylight world, and sensing the glances at our dead-white skin and sudden stubble, and clasping to our bellies the petards of Kavkaz as though throwing ourselves under a tank with them, or rather, under the cars and trucks, we stood in the middle of the street and gasped for breath, we would never get across this torrent, and I, for one, really didn’t know where to go next, and by now I no longer wanted to go where we were “eagerly awaited,” and besides, Pavel Petrovich seemed dispirited after his night … No park, no plantings—a hellish neighborhood. New construction that was no longer new, a fifties development. Elephantine buildings with sealed, fortresslike entrances and special old ladies who in that quarter-century had grown up on the benches at the entrances. Even Pavel Petrovich, everywhere the insider, finally seemed at a loss. But you don’t know Pavel Petrovich! Nor did I, at the time, know all there was to know about him … Our goal was literally a few feet away. He was squinting at those few feet not because he was lost but because he was about to make a dash. Across from the liquor store they were making repairs, or rather, remodeling the first floor into something, most probably another liquor store. The showering star of the welding torch was our landmark … A laborer had donned his visor and was welding some kind of structure in a looming black doorway. Pavel Petrovich headed for him confidently. I spinelessly followed, already under his spell again. He approached the welder and said not a word to him—although this time it surely wasn’t Simyon but a man he didn’t know at all, any more than I did—said not a word to him, just: “Let us by.” The welder immediately entered into our situation, with absolutely no mother oaths. He extinguished his torch, raised his visor to reveal his good, working-class face, and readily moved aside, clearing the way for us. He, too, said not a word, just: “But step to the back … ” I instantaneously completed the sentence in my mind: “ … so that nobody sees you.” But I was wrong again, because the sentence had a different ending: “ … so that I don’t blind you.” “Step to the back so that I don’t blind you”—the phrase gave me no less happiness than the morning that had met me outside the police station! We walked in. And he truly didn’t watch us go, he said nothing further to us in parting but went on with his interrupted work.