by Andrei Bitov
Pavel Petrovich holds the pause, relishing it, but Doctor D. holds it, too.
“You noted that the first skip was long, the second a bit shorter, the third … well, and so on. What does this mean?”
“Well, if you want to switch to mathematical language, it’s a linear graph of negative acceleration.”
“Really. I’ll have to remember that. But all the same, it’s a superficial description. Doesn’t this remind you of a clock pendulum?”
“Not in general, no. Well, unless you hang the stone on a thread—”
“Oh, but why hang it, Doctor? That’s like the Armenian riddle, you know: it hangs, it’s green, and it cheeps. You know the riddle? Good, good. But your mathematical point, about acceleration, is exactly what I had in mind. When the pendulum gets to the end, what does it do? It … stops. And in order to stop, what does it do? It … slows … down. Do you follow?”
“Naturally. The damping of the pendulum.”
“Damping. Excellent! And what does that imply?”
This time, too, they both hold the pause.
“It implies that even a clock, in order to run, must stop, every second. Unlike time! A clock is mere rhythm, no more. It arbitrarily beats out the twenty-four hours for us. It doesn’t measure time. Every thoughtful person knows this. But a clock isn’t so naive as that same thoughtful person believes. You, for example. Do you think I felt offended by you? I felt offended for the clocks. The master craftsmen.”
“Master craftsmen? I in no way touched on craftsmen. A clock is a clock. It runs.”
“That’s exactly it! How does the master craftsman differ from the scientist? He has feeling! Clocks … ” Pavel Petrovich snorts disdainfully. “What other article has man complicated so unnecessarily as clocks? How hasn’t he decorated them! What chimes, what repeaters! And what hasn’t he crafted them from! Crystal clocks, porcelain clocks, gold clocks, straw clocks. Water clocks! Man has—well, he’s simply made clocks from everything. Finished one, started another. Why? Even in our own century, when there are no craftsmen left, only industry, what clocks haven’t we invented! Already it’s hard to recall the ones we had in our youth. Remember how proud we once were: anti-magnetic, shock-resistant, waterproof … Where are those windmills today? Now even the electronic clock is yesterday … Now it has a radio, a computer, and a television built in. Why so much?”
The doctor still isn’t taking the bait. And Pavel Petrovich goes on.
“Because, and only because, what people measure by the clock is not time, but their relationship to it! A clock is a ritual cult object, not a practical one. You’re late or on time, not because you use a clock, but because you need something or you don’t.”
“Bravo!” the doctor responds. “That’s true. You’re right about late arrivals. Speaking of which, I’ve been engrossed in our conversation, and now I’m late. Where are we going, by the way?” And indeed, the round bay on which they met is no longer visible. A long, boring strip of shore stretches ahead, and the rim of the sun has already thrust up from behind the mountains.
“You’re late?” Pavel Petrovich says cheerfully, greeting this as his own victory over time. “Good, good. You’re not too upset, I take it. But where was it you needed to go?”
“Oh, my colleagues wanted to show me some sort of relict grove and then take me to see the monkeys—”
“The relict grove!” Pavel Petrovich exults. “Why, that’s exactly where we’re going. You may not even be late. We’ll even meet them all there.”
“Still, it’s an amusing twist. We got talking about clocks and forgot about time.”
“Remarkable! A remarkable twist! We haven’t even begun to talk about time. Now that you’re not in a hurry, we can talk a while. If this interests you, of course.”
“How do you come to have such an interest in clocks? Is it professional? Are you interested in them as a sculptor?”
“A sculptor … Amusing. I can see the scientist in you. Your observation is accurate. Thanks for the idea. But of course. Above all, a clock is a sculpture. A conventional kinetic sculpture, if I may use the language of the avant-garde. A monument to time, as it were. To what else has man erected so many monuments? Lenin and Stalin together didn’t dream of so many. I once had occasion to repair a clock with Lenin—”
“What? Is there a Lenin monument with a clock?”
“Oh, no, a regular mantel clock, it struck the Kremlin chimes. I was working as a watchmaker then—”
The doctor laughs happily. “I think you’ve made a monkey of me, Pavel Petrovich.”
“Oh, but no, my dear fellow. You don’t believe me, but it’s true, I did work as a watchmaker. So I haven’t made a monkey of you yet. Would you like me to? Let’s play this game. If you guess how many skips, you owe me a bottle. If you don’t guess, I owe you.”
“Excuse me, how do you mean? I don’t follow. If I guess, I lose?”
“How truly distrustful you are. Truly the scientist. Your logic suffocates you. You yourself said you couldn’t guess. I’m offering you more advantageous conditions. Risk-free, from your point of view, I might say. Well?”
Pavel Petrovich is already holding a suitable stone.
“Well, all right.” The doctor chuckles. “Do you really want to lose, rather than win?”
Pavel Petrovich looks sad. “Yes, I want terribly to lose. But I never lose. Believe me, it’s actually boring.”
“But I’m going to pick at random—and you’ve lost.”
“Oh, how I’d like to hope!”
“Well, as you wish.”
“Well?” Pavel Petrovich freezes in the posture of the “Youth Pitching Horseshoes.” “Remember, in Pushkin? ‘Briskly the youth took a step, And he crouched with one hand on his knee … ’ ”
“Well, eight.”
Pavel Petrovich throws.
“One, two, three … ” Doctor D. counts. “Six, seven … ”
The stone suddenly halts and sinks—like a stone—to the bottom. As if diving. As if alive.
“Eight,” the doctor says, with a somehow childish plaintiveness.
“It’s even hard to conceal how distressed I am,” Pavel Petrovich says, accepting the money from the doctor. He disappears in the bushes.
And the doctor, deep in thought, scratches his nose.
It’s hard to say exactly what he is thinking. We are eavesdropping and spying, no more. But his expression is eloquent. On first thought, the prospect of a drinking spree makes his nose itch, as usual. On second thought, he is not such a fool as to hope for Pavel Petrovich’s return. On third thought (there being no hope), he hadn’t planned on drinking first thing in the morning. Why, he had even run down to the sea with the intention of having a swim at dawn. He fully looks the beachgoer, although basically he doesn’t care for either swimming or sunbathing, since by occupation he spends his whole life on the beach. So he can take it or leave it. Lest his research associates succumb to laziness, he must set an example: at home he doesn’t swim or sunbathe. But here it’s a different matter. Here he can indulge. He is wearing shorts, tennis shoes, and a silly little cap with a long visor, with a towel around his neck. And he hasn’t even gotten his swim. That odd man … On first thought, Doctor D. has never met anyone like him before. On second thought, the man is suspiciously reminiscent of something—far in the past, but it happened to the doctor himself … Doctor D. tries, and simply can’t recall. Suddenly abandoned by Pavel Petrovich, he strolls along the water’s edge, along the shore—always in profile, in profile, bobbing his head and picking up his tall, thin legs—and his long visor further emphasizes his resemblance to the subject of his studies, the bird. Thus he strolls and meditates, and this time we can definitely state that he is meditating on Pavel Petrovich, because he is hunting up the flattest stones on the whole pebbled beach and trying to throw them, but they just won’t skip for him. Again, they sink like stones: straight to the bottom.
And now he laughs, content with his loss.
Resolutely he strips to his underpants, in order to take his swim at last, then and there. But having undressed he does not go in the water. He sits down and looks at the sea, once more somehow contriving to be sideways to us.
Thus he sits naked, like a big plucked bird, and now he is probably comparing the seas: his own sea, a northern one, the Baltic, with this southern sea, the Black. No comparison! A deficiency of birds. No sand. The gray color of the pebbles in the littoral zone ruins everything. It’s not just the fauna, somehow things are worse here with the flora, too. Still, he has to walk as far as the so-called relict grove. Before …
Before the sun hits the beach. It has already fully risen from behind the mountains and hangs above them like the moon. It lights the whole sea, and the sea becomes truly black. Black as oil, as mercury, as amalgam, as a mirror … as shoe polish, as a shined shoe. Something of that sort. The doctor changes his mind about swimming.
He vacillates a moment longer, whether to return or to walk ahead. Toward where the relict grove is. If that odd man wasn’t lying … But even if he wasn’t lying, how far is it?
He sees a bird at last. It’s only a seagull. But still.
And he walks toward where the seagull is. Ahead then, not back. He paces like a crane, his visor nodding northward.
Why has he come here? Strictly speaking, to play hooky. To have a swim. He doesn’t feel like swimming. The relict grove and the upcoming excursion to the monkeys don’t interest him all that much. The monkeys don’t interest him because he has no expert knowledge of them. They hold some interest for him only in connection with the human population. Apropos of this, ever since a certain moment (again, somehow mysteriously connected with Pavel Petrovich—he does have something to do with this!), he has more and more often been thinking forbidden thoughts. Unprofessional ones, but so alluring … He has suddenly discovered that, if he is honest, he has long since lost interest in thinking about birds. Only one animal is interesting to think about—man. And the more interesting, the more terrifying. Or rather, the more terrifying, the more interesting. This is his scientific adultery.
The Black Sea doesn’t interest him, either. The only thing about it that interests him is the sulfur. That sulfurous bottom layer, which continues to grow, leaving only a few dozen meters for surface life. That layer interests him, again, from the standpoint of the activity of the human species. But whether because the people here in the south are all lazy and incompetent, or because there’s a kind of secrecy … so far, he has obtained no information on the dynamics of the sulfur layer more precise than what he himself already possesses. And no one is suggesting where to obtain it. More likely, they themselves don’t know.
The monkey colony itself doesn’t interest him. Nor, especially, do their experiments. To begin with, none of their work is up to the mark. This Dragamashchenka … They say he has an off-limits laboratory, something to do with man. But he just won’t talk. Won’t talk because he doesn’t have anything, or because he doesn’t need to? Secrecy, or the appearance of secrecy? Dragamashchenka is no biologist … But he doesn’t talk, as a professional. Yesterday, though, Doctor D. himself talked. Cracked, spilled his secrets. He shouldn’t have argued about man yesterday. He had one drink too many with them. Not surprising, when that girl in white … Regina, was it? … was hanging on his every word. They have much better liquor, by the way, than he has at the station. One and the same Academy of Sciences, you’d think, but the liquor is different. Why should monkeys get better liquor, as if they were bosses over the birds?
This thought should cheer the doctor, for, again, it is not about birds and monkeys, but about man. And for that reason, of course, he will go on the excursion to the site of the natural monkey settlement. In the first place, he has never seen primates in a herd, close up. He is very tempted to take a good look at the structure of their society … The monkey is free in Russia, under socialism! We’re not free, but the monkey is! The story is that freedom immediately led to the blossoming of their secondary sexual characteristics: their manes grew thick as lions’ manes, and their gluteal calluses blossomed like roses. But their tails got frostbitten. It’s Russia, after all, even though without cages. And, too, they can’t feed themselves, they require supplemental feeding—vestiges of socialism already … Hm. He will have to go.
But here we are already violating our own precepts—we’re beginning to think for Doctor D.
All we can state with confidence is that he suddenly emerges from his reverie and starts to hurry. Because there’s something up ahead. A lot of seagulls, a racket. Looks as if there’s even a man …
With Pavel Petrovich, we somehow find it easier to think what he thought. It’s much harder to predict what he will say.
In the first place, we increasingly see Pavel Petrovich face on, unlike Doctor D. Perhaps because he’s always talking, and we’re listening. Face on, he’s shorter and wider than the doctor, even more so than he actually is. So it seems. They’re nearly identical in both height and weight, but the impression is quite different. By the way, it has been very amusing to observe the two together: one always in profile and the other face on, one tall, the other short, one gaunt, the other not exactly fat but tubby-looking, and apparently with a bald spot, for some reason, in contrast to the doctor, although this is untrue: Pavel Petrovich definitely isn’t bald. It has been amusing to observe them together, and it’s too bad they have parted so soon.
Having received the money, Pavel Petrovich goes charging into the bushes face on, like a little wild boar. Squat and sturdy, he barrels along in a straight line, as if meeting no obstacle, as if parting not only the bushes but also the houses and fences. And he pops out onto the highway, right at the bus station. Sprawling around it is a modest, dusty little bazaar with two roosters (feet tied with a bootlace, eyes rolled up from the utter horror of life), three watermelons, and a bundle of churkhcheli, but he doesn’t stop to look at all that, he goes straight up to a wrinkled little old man who has an inordinate growth of gray stubble and is dozing under his inordinately large cap (the kind that was once nicknamed an “airdrome”), so that his face is completely indiscernible behind the stubble and the cap, but Pavel Petrovich sweeps all this aside and achieves swift understanding, rather divinely, even. And now, holding a dark bottle corked with a plug of newspaper, he looks like a Partisan ready to fling himself under an enemy tank. He dives into a fence, just as he did into the bushes, and promptly finds himself on the shore, but in a completely different place—the very place the doctor is now approaching, alerted by the racket of the seagulls.
There is a dolphin on the shore.
He has been dead quite a while. The flies are already hard at work on him. By now even the gulls don’t seem to want to eat him, they are merely circling and screaming, impressed by the event itself.
It is indeed an event.
Doctor D. stares vacantly at the dolphin’s flank, which is streaked with tints of walleye white and mother-of-pearl … “streaked” is the wrong word … “traced” is wrong, too … “shimmering” is wrong, “gleaming” is wrong … there’s no right word. It is unlike Doctor D., professionally observing the death of an individual, to have thoughts about it, about either the death or the individual. But now for the first time he has suddenly, unthinkingly, fallen into a reverie. Is the dolphin totally dead? On first thought, of course, he isn’t alive. But is he all that dead?
The morning light lies freely on his skin and slides off like a glance. His flank has dried, and as it loses its own warmth it is taking on the temperature of the environment. As if the sun were licking up its warmth, and not vice versa. The dolphin is no longer reflecting but isn’t yet absorbing, either: the water has dried from his flank, but the light has not. The unarguable fact of death is bewildering precisely from the scientific point of view. A liberation from the biological program, from the previous servitude of feeding and multiplying. A release. Go to sleep. Rest. The doctor feels like asking, “What’s wrong?”
The dolphin holds his peace. As if he’s still waiting for something, and it hasn’t come.
“This one won’t come back to life,” Pavel Petrovich says.
The doctor has been so engrossed that he is genuinely frightened. The silence breaks—the seagulls burst into screams.
“But he may rise from the dead.”
“Don’t be a fool!” The doctor, in fright, covers his privy parts for some reason and then is embarrassed to have done this.
“I understand,” Pavel Petrovich says, with a fitting expression. “It’s a real shame … But I’ve been waiting for you a long time. I haven’t opened it.” He displays the bottle.
“You could have, even without me,” the doctor growls, rather rudely.
He is no less shocked by Pavel Petrovich’s return, however, than by the spectacle of another’s death.
“I could not,’ Pavel Petrovich replies. “The money was yours, after all.” And he thrusts the change into the doctor’s pocket.
“But you won?”
“I played for the bottle, not for the money,” Pavel Petrovich parries, with dignity. “Let’s go around the corner, we’ll drink to the memory of God’s servant Dolphinarium.”
“Dolphinarium? That’s not his proper name, it’s—”
“I know, I know. Anyway, let’s get out of here,” Pavel Petrovich says, nudging the doctor as if toward an exit. “I spotted a nice place—”
“Around the corner?” The doctor is still sarcastic, still resisting.
“Yes! Pavel Petrovich laughs. “Around that one over there!” He points to a small nearby cape.
“And he certainly isn’t God’s servant,” the doctor continues. He is already following submissively. “You and I are God’s servants. But he—”