by Andrei Bitov
“We are not God’s! We are uprisen servants, the worst of categories: servants, but not God’s. But he—yes, you’re right. He’s not a servant. But he’s God’s. God’s creature. What bastards we Russians are—how can we use the word ‘creature’ as an expletive? ‘Creature’ means created by God! That’s our godlessness talking! A viper spewing from our lips!”
“But creeping things are also God’s creations, you know!” the doctor protests adroitly.
“Damnation! God forgive me! The devil made me say it. How easily I bit, old fool that I am!” He is sincerely distressed. “But in truth, it’s one more proof of our irreverence toward Creation. Again, I’m right! But that, let me tell you, is a topic. That’s not so simple, the reptiles … This way, please … Right this way … A splendid little spot.”
They make themselves comfortable.
Pavel Petrovich is like the Magic Tablecloth. This is a fairytale spot, between the roots of a large pine. It even has sand, all strewn with needles, cones, and other charming detritus of life. So Pavel Petrovich sits himself down as if their surroundings were of his own making, produces a tumbler he has scavenged somewhere along the way, noisily pulls the cork with his teeth, and fills the glass more than halfway.
“Here.” He offers it to the doctor.
“With nothing to munch on?”
“Even the press will suffice for me.” Pavel Petrovich sniffs the paper cork expressively. “For you, however … ” He glances around quickly and reaches for an herb of some sort. Plucks it and holds it out to the doctor. “Sniff, then drink, and then sniff. It’s a great help. You can chew it, too, no harm in that, but it’s not strictly necessary. People like it either way. A matter of taste.”
The doctor both sniffs and chews. And sniffs.
“What marvel is this?”
“I don’t know the Latin name. We call it ‘dullvein.’ ”
The doctor is amused at the way Pavel Petrovich greedily catches up with him.
“So it wasn’t even corked, just plugged. Really, couldn’t you have taken a sip along the way?”
“But how could I!” Pavel Petrovich is sincerely hurt by such a suggestion. “Now, you mention the reptiles. ‘Reptile,’ in our country, has long meant a policeman, and not the noble snake. Either way it’s unfair. To both the cops and the reptiles. An insult, as you have justly noted, is always reciprocal. Infelicity in a simile is an insult! As you see, style is a vital thing. When I was—”
“What, have you found time to be a policeman, too?”
Pavel Petrovich frowns. “Why, yes. An Investigator for Especially Important Cases. An executioner. I used to shoot unfortunates in the dungeons. I’d choose the most unfortunate and shoot them.” Pavel Petrovich flickers his jaw muscles. “What do you take me for?”
“Not for a rept … I’m sorry, but you weren’t a snake, were you?”
“Don’t be silly! A snake catcher. I was a snake catcher, understand? Well, let me tell you, they’re the noblest beasts. They wouldn’t bite for the world, not for the world. Unlike you . . .”
“Come now, Pavel Petrovich! Among us zoologists, the word ‘reptiles’ isn’t an insult at all. The legitimate name of an order of animals, no more. True, they certainly aren’t beasts, as you choose to call them. ‘Beast’ is a synonym of ‘mammal.’ ”
“I know even that, Doctor,” Pavel Petrovich says, resentfully pouring another. “Creeping things crawl, and mammals breastfeed. And you won’t mix me up on the animal species. Better you tell me: to what species does the lancelet, for example, belong?”
“You know that, too?!” the doctor says delightedly, taking a sniff of dull vein.
“Now, you mention death … ” Pavel Petrovich says, taking a sniff of cork. “But have you ever been in the desert? What a noble, dry death it is there! The wind blows away all those little skins, twigs, skeletons. The rustle alone remains, like a sigh. The plants—they even rot beautifully. But we? I can’t get that dolphin out of my mind … What do you think he died of?”
“I don’t know. Possibly of natural causes. Stupidity, an accidental wound. He was still very young.”
“How did you decide that? He was full adult size.”
“I know nothing about dolphins, but there are a number of shared attributes. In the baby lion and the baby elephant, so to speak, the mousling and the froglet, the human youngling and the unknown beastie.{52} Oh, the steep brow, short nose, round eyes—it’s all been programmed into our emotion so that we’ll drive ourselves to feed them, defend them, not hurt them … ”
“Provide them with shoes, clothes … Well, you’re a wonder, Doctor! Not a word about love. But that’s where all the toys come from! Not for children, but from children. I hear you! So his own kind couldn’t have hurt him?”
“Not only couldn’t they have hurt him, it’s even strange that they lost him. To the best of my recollection, dolphins live as nuclear families, like people. In four generations, moreover.”
“What’s a nuclear … ”
“Husband, wife, children. But the grandmother and grandfather, too. And they also have the great-grandfather and great-grandmother.”
“Brilliant. You’re not fictionalizing? But how did they lose him?”
“How would I know? I’m a scientist. I have to know already in order to infer something more. Well—he became engrossed in a game. Got hit by a propeller. Dived too deep, drank too much hydrogen sulfide, and suffocated … But most likely it was the overall environmental picture. He no longer wanted to live.”
“Committed suicide? How could a beast, God’s creature, not want to live? That’s unscientific, Doctor. As you say, it’s built into him—the undeniable desire to live. Only man can fail to want to live. You yourself curse anthropomorphism, and yet you yourself are lapsing into it.”
“No, it’s not I but you who are lapsing into anthropomorphism, Pavel Petrovich. You so dramatically express your dissatisfaction with the human species (I mean in the biological, not the social sense, as you are aware), and in spite of myself I have to agree with you in many respects, yet all you’re doing is magnifying man. Suicide is actually very prevalent in the animal world. Mass suicide, moreover. We, meaning Homo sapiens, are the ones who see suicide as an individual act. For the self-replicating systems called living organisms, the termination of the individual—that is, death—is merely an evolved characteristic: they are merely links in an unbroken chain of descent … Their purpose is not their own life but the continuation of the genus and species. After fulfilling their purpose they have nothing to do in this life. Not only the very noble scorpions you saw in the desert, my dear Pavel Petrovich, and not only the males, whose purpose, as you yourself say, is briefer, and not only the humpback salmon you caught on Kamchatka. The mechanisms for regulating the population of a species are extremely diverse and quite unknown. Unfortunately, we make our own monstrous correction in them.”
Against his will, Pavel Petrovich is curious.
“Let’s suppose there’s prosperity. They’ve had good weather, a lot of food, few predators. All the progeny have survived, the flock has grown large. On the return trip, during the autumn migration, the young ones seem to become foolhardy. They perish from all sorts of causes—bump into high-voltage wires in flight, let themselves be eaten by anyone who feels like it. Just as many arrive as the last time, as many as permissible and necessary, because it’s by no means certain that the same accidentally favorable circumstances await them there, and an extra mouth may prove, as before, to be no earthly use. Now let’s suppose there’s poverty. The flock has multiplied according to its normal tendencies. But they’ve had bad weather, little food, many predators. The loss of each individual becomes super-important for the existence of the whole flock. Remarkable things happen. The individual becomes strong, wary, bold, and ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of his neighbor. Yes, his very self-sacrifice is a sign of the desire to live. Man’s activity destroys these regulation mechanisms. Then the animals
simply can’t live, they develop depression, and yes, they commit suicide. Fling themselves up on shore, like whales.”
“You think he committed suicide?”
“It’s conceivable.”
“Inconceivable! You yourself say he was too young.”
“Don’t young people commit suicide?”
“He lacked a library, that’s what!” Pavel Petrovich declares decisively. “A great-grandpa, that is. After all, what’s the remarkable thing about the dolphin family? Why did they, as a community close to us and possessing far more resources than monkeys, fail to take our path? They’re not a family but a floating library, with the experience of four generations on one shelf! Great-grandfather! Great-grandfather is what man has always lacked! Have you ever noticed that a man’s lifetime, even if full-length, is exactly one generation short of a century? From this comes our whole misfortune; from this grows man’s ungovernable history, like rust. A century is a natural measure of history, but we never equal the century, never have time to be either a great-grandson or a great-grandfather, and therefore never see how an affair began or how it ended. We participate only in the process or the result, we witness either birth without death or death without birth. We, it turns out, are those ‘individuals’ of yours, whose death is a matter of indifference to life. We do not know the sole measure of time: justice! But the dolphins know.”
“Great-grandpa told them?”
“Yes! Exactly! Your human irony is misplaced. Among dolphins, a century swims as one family! And all are witness to each other. Among dolphins, the history of the family doesn’t diverge from the history of the species, as it does among men. There exists but one justice—the sole measure of time. But among men there is a constant arrhythmia of family and species. The history of mankind is separate, and hostile to man. Hence history, may it be damned!”
Pavel Petrovich puts a great deal of venom into his pronunciation of the word “history.”
“Justice is too subjective a concept.” (The doctor’s words.)
“Objective! And the death of the individual is by no means a matter of indifference! No, I can’t … ” Pavel Petrovich lets out a sob. “Surely you understand that the mother no longer has her son, the grandfather his grandson? That his dolphin death has indeed broken your famous chain?! And his lone death may signify that we have already destroyed all the dolphins! We poisoned the sea, and the first to perish was the weakest—the great-grandfather. He failed to survive. We’ve reduced their family by the greatgrandfather. Now that they have three generations, like us, they will no longer be able to live. You and I have just seen the great-grandson perish. Perhaps, being illiterate, he intended to come up on dry land, like us? Without his great-grandfather, the great-grandson not only has perished but will not become a father, either! Dear God! what ni-i-i-ight!” Pavel Petrovich cries, rocking as if from toothache. “What did he see, when we looked at him?”
“He saw nothing.”
“I understand. He’s dead. Like everyone else, you don’t even believe in the soul: that it’s still nearby and gazing at itself from above … But the dead, too, look at me. They themselves don’t seem to want to look, or to see me, but I feel myself behind their closed eyelids … And such darkness presses down on me, hems me in! After all, we live in darkness! We have simply been illuminated. From outside. By the sun. By the source of light. The tiny lantern … Imagine how dark it is inside you. In your stomach, your brains, your innards … your heart! Like in a tree, in a stone. What do they see? They exist in primordial night.”
“Well, but trees see in their own way. They not only sense warmth, they also feed on light.”
“Oh, that’s obvious. A blind man sees, too, in some such sense. If only with other organs. I mean something different … I can’t explain it even to myself, let alone to you. My point is that we exist in darkness as in death, and in death as in darkness. We don’t see objects—we see the way the light falls on them. We ourselves, on earth, where we exist, among our own selves, live in darkness. And being dead is a more real state than being alive. Because the dead man doesn’t see the objects surrounding him: he himself is an object, merely illuminated from the outside. He doesn’t see the way the light falls; for him, the source has been switched off. Does he see the light itself? Isn’t he made of absolute darkness, in his own mind? Isn’t it the dead man who’s a particle of light, while we are merely a clot of darkness? In death we become a habitat, a homogeneous one, like water or air, but even more homogeneous: light. In life we are separated from one another by opacity, life is not homogeneous, it is scattered like peas. Oh, if only life were a habitat! There would be no death. So our habitat is death, not life. Non-existence is homogeneous. And life doesn’t end with death, we live in it, in death. Death isn’t separate—it is the habitat of life. Like water for fish, like air for your birds.”
“Good heavens, Pavel Petrovich,” the doctor exclaims. “Are you saying this to me, or did I think it? Brilliant! Well then, is a fish or a bird more dead than we are?”
“Ah, how precisely you’ve captured the thought! Bravo, Doctor! Yes, the bird is more dead. She is dead when flying. Not in vain is she death’s herald among all peoples. What do we know of her sensations in flight? Now, you. Doctor—you know all about birds. What does she feel in flight? Is she not swimming in death? And later she will alight—to live alongside us a while, to catch her breath. Incidentally, is the phoenix a man or a bird?”
Doctor D. considers at length. “More likely a bird …”
“What would you say as an ornithologist: might the phoenix perhaps be a species that has its biological niche (I use your terminology) at the boundary of two habitats, death and life? That is, not on but in the boundary.”
“A boundary is a line,” the doctor objects. “A line, in a mathematical sense, has one dimension. That is, there’s no way it can be a niche.”
“You won’t muddle me, Doctor! The phoenix is a man in the form of a bird.”
“No, it’s a bird in the form of a man!”
“Neither. Our phoenix is merely a representation of the phoenix, it’s a phoenix in the form of a man.”
“Now, that’s more exact. But then he’s a phoenix in the form of a bird.”
“You’re somewhat muddled, Doctor.”
“You’re trying to muddle me! Let’s sort out who said what to whom—”
“You’ll never sort it out now.” Pavel Petrovich is pleased with something.
“It’s nothing but a metaphor. Unscientific,” the doctor says crossly. “The main point is that the phoenix burns and is reborn in the fire. In a physical and chemical sense, life is combustion.”
“Oh yes, decomposition. I, too, went to sixth grade, Doctor! In the sixth grade I was still going to school, it was the seventh I didn’t go to. For man, it’s first life, then death. But for the phoenix, it’s the reverse: first death, then life. The phoenix is simply a man in reverse.”
“Simply? … Then he’s in the form of a bird.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore. Tell me, which is more important, the head or the wings?”
“More important? … The distinguishing feature.”
“Which is?”
“In man, the head. In a bird, the wings.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes, and that settles it. No either/or. The phoenix is both a man and a bird.”
“Neither. He was a woman.”
“Oh yes, the tits.” The doctor laughs. “Is the sphinx a woman, too, in your opinion?”
“That’s your thesis, Doctor, about the distinguishing feature. But the distinguishing feature of a woman is hardly her tits.”
“You’ve caught me again, Pavel Petrovich … Another thing I’ve been trying to guess, ever since childhood: how does the mermaid make the transition to a tail? In all the illustrations, the artists skillfully avoid answering … ”
“Bravo, Doctor! I’m downright delighted what an unspoiled person you really are, even though
a scientist. You actually seek an answer in art? Well, you don’t know and we don’t show—not because we don’t know, but because we avoid showing.”
“But why do ‘you’ try so hard to avoid it?” the doctor says ironically.
“For aesthetic reasons.”
“Ah.”
“Tut-tut! Again, you have only one thing on your mind, Doctor … I was thinking of the more ethical side of the aesthetic.”
“Pavel Petrovich! Have mercy on a fool. What does ethics have to do with this!”
“A lot indeed, young man! Why should it be, do you think, that in the phoenix, the sphinx, the centaur, and the mermaid, the human part is the head and breast, while the privates, excuse me, are not human?”
“Oh, so that’s your ethics! Anthropomorphism again … again, apartheid for the animal world! But if it’s the other way around? The body human, but head of an animal?”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“It does, it does!” the doctor exults. “Even in that same ancient Egypt, if you recall … Don’t you remember, what’s his name, with the bird’s head?”
Pavel Petrovich becomes sad and very silent. With relish, the ironic doctor develops his theme—everything he can possibly recall. The sphinx, he says, is nevertheless male, and the mermaid is not a fish, and certainly the centaur is male, because he has a beard, although there are also women with beards, but if you just look under the centaur’s tail he’s male both ways, both as a man and as a horse … that being the case, it would be interesting to know which he prefers, mares or …
No, the doctor shouldn’t carouse like this!
‘‘Prefers! Women, of course,” Pavel Petrovich states, with knowledge of the issue, and just then an idea strikes him. He rises up vertically, like a swallow. “De-e-e … de-e-e … de-e … ” he bleats. ‘‘But there was such a god of death, and his name was Ptah. And he was from over there, but the ones you’re always looking at under the tail, they’re from here, from you and me. That’s where ethics comes in! There’s a boundary, but no such thing as a distinguishing feature! Your distinguishing feature doesn’t exist—that’s what! So death doesn’t have one, either.”