The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  Doctor D. leaps around the carpet like a monkey, his hands nimbly catching something invisible to us, perhaps a butterfly, perhaps a housefly, perhaps one of his little birds … Pavel Petrovich watches him with affectionate sorrow.

  “To catch … ” Choking with laughter, the doctor continues to catch air in his hands. “A high … I caught it!” Slowly, one finger at a time, the doctor opens his fist. “It flew away, flew away!” the doctor chortles.

  And he catches it again.

  “D-d … D-d … ” Pavel Petrovich, his eyes half closed, is moaning in great distress. “D-d … ”

  “What?” Doctor D. suddenly wakes up. “You don’t want me to laugh so hard?” He is still emitting spurts of laughter, like a boiling teakettle that has just been turned off.

  “De … de … ”

  “Death?” the doctor guesses, and stops gurgling. But his nose is still spouting steam. “What’s the matter, Pavel Petrovich?”

  “De … de … ”{53}

  The doctor shakes Pavel Petrovich, trying to bring him to his senses.

  “Dessert!” Pavel Petrovich says clearly, at last, fixing his eyes on the doctor. “Doctor, you’re a teakettle.”

  At last he, too, has succeeded in laughing. The doctor looks around distractedly, as if for dessert or the teakettle, not understanding how he came to be here.

  “Forgive me, Doctor, I’m a bad man.”

  “What did you slip me?!”

  “Grass, Doctor, grass.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me? That really wasn’t nice, it wasn’t comradely—”

  “Without it you wouldn’t have caught your high. It was comradely.”

  “Why dessert? Why a teakettle?” The doctor is hurt, like a child.

  “Forgive me, Doctor, truly. I didn’t mean it that way. Forgive me. For spoiling your high. It made me envious.” Pavel Petrovich stands up. “Let’s go, Doctor.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “A nation deprived of beer—” Pavel Petrovich intones darkly.

  “Stop bullshitting me!”

  “A nation deprived of beer is unworthy of the name of nation!” Pavel Petrovich concludes.

  And they set off. Northward. Past the relict grove. Without a glance at the sea. Deprived of beer.

  Moreover, Doctor D. somehow preserves his profile, as before, stepping along the water’s edge as if on fine sand, while Pavel Petrovich, face on, crunches rudely over the coarse, already scorching pebbles.

  The sun beats down full force. Doctor D., in profile, wears his visor. Pavel Petrovich, face on, wears a leaf on his cantankerous nose.

  They are essentially silent. To the limit of their ability to keep their mouths shut.

  “I’m afraid we won’t overtake them now.”

  “Your colleagues? Don’t you imagine you’ve already outstripped them?”

  “You’re a devil, Pavel Petrovich.”

  “I thought we’d already distributed the roles. So far, everything’s going according to script. You’re Faust, I’m Mephistopheles. I, too, have lost a day’s work, by the way. I came out to do some drawing and forgot my sketchbook.”

  “But you’re a sculptor.”

  “Sculptors also draw. Sketches.”

  “Do you plan to sculpt the sea?”

  “Very insightful, Doctor. That’s exactly what I plan. It’s my secret dream—to raise a monument to the sea.”

  “In what form, I wonder?”

  “in the form of a cow.”

  “?!”

  “But you saw the dolphin … It almost got me all mixed up. They call it a sea cow.”

  “The sea cow is a completely different creature.”

  “I know that. Surely you couldn’t think I’d sculpt a cow, I mean, the sea … I mean a cow … symbolically! I’m a realist! The sea … in the form of a dolphin! Pah!! Any mediocrity could do that.”

  “I don’t understand.’

  “You will yet,” Pavel Petrovich declares darkly. “You will see. Better you didn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Not everyone can endure it.”

  “I don’t know much about art. I’m a rank-and-file scientist. I assume that being a sculptor is a calling. But how did you discover it? How is it possible to be born a poet, a painter, a violinist?”

  “People deprived of childhood … ” Pavel Petrovich says darkly.

  “Who?”

  “Violinists, I say.”

  “I’m talking about you. How did you guess that you were a sculptor, specifically?”

  “And how did you think to catch birds?”

  “It’s not the same. But strangely enough, I do remember how it all began. I mean, I don’t even remember, Mama told me—”

  “You were born and caught a bird?”

  “Exactly! I was just barely walking, everyone was playing in the sand, and I kept walking around a water barrel where the birds occasionally came and drank. And finally I thought to set the lid on the barrel in such a way that the lid slammed shut when a bird lighted on the edge to drink. And I caught one!”

  “Well, there you are. And you ask how to become a sculptor … According to spiritual affinity. That’s not my definition, it’s my teacher’s.”

  “You were a sculptor’s apprentice? Like in the Middle Ages?”

  “Bravo, Doctor! Exactly like in the Middle Ages—our best age, believe it or not. I’m an apprentice of Grigory Skovoroda.{54} He maintained, in particular, that men were unhappy because they didn’t find themselves occupations according to their spiritual affinity. He divided all mankind into three parts and came up with the clergy, the military, and the peasantry. He advised us to keep a close eye on the infant. If he joins in the chorus—to the seminary. If he reaches for the saber—be a soldier. If he amuses himself with worms—then plow. When everyone finds himself an occupation according to his affinity, that’s happiness for you.”

  “But then which are we?”

  “We? We’re illegitimates.”

  “…”

  “Peter the Great issued this ukase: ‘Illegitimates to be registered as artists.’ You, too, are an artist,” Pavel Petrovich says, graciously issuing his own ukase. It does not sound convincing, and he adds, “In your own way … Aren’t you tormented by thirst? Shall we play another, perhaps?”

  Doctor D. grins. Without further hesitation, he proffers the change to Pavel Petrovich. “Yes, you and I seem to have found an occupation according to our affinity.”

  “It’s no joke.” Pavel Petrovich, likewise without hesitation, accepts the money. “If every man were busy with his own affairs, where would we get aggressions and depressions, which are basically one and the same thing? Instead of the pointless struggle against dissidence and alcoholism, I’d busy the psychiatrist with this: the diagnostics of vocation. The psychiatrist would write a prescription for the minister of foreign affairs: Make paper cutouts of dragons or roses. For the war minister: Straighten old nails. And so on. With retention of salary and privileges. Can you imagine how happy it would make them? Us, too, at the same time. ‘The Tale of How One Peasant Fed Two Generals’ wouldn’t be a fairy tale at all. He’d feed them! If only because they wouldn’t bother him anymore. And the main thing is, that peasant would get beer production rolling. And the nation would become a nation.”

  Doctor D. frowns. “Only let’s don’t talk about Russia.”

  “What else is there to talk about! It’s all we ever talk about. Doctor, you’re not a Jew, by any chance?”

  “Me? I don’t think so. What does it matter?”

  “But you’re an intellectual, my friend … It does matter, it does. In your place I wouldn’t renounce this so lightly.”

  “And you yourself, Pavel Petrovich?”

  “Me myself? … Who among us has not been a Jew? … We won’t make sense of this without a half liter.”

  “Where are you going?” is all the doctor has time to say. And he climbs up to a shady spot. The beach is stran
gely empty today, he thinks. Then why is he thinking about Malthus again? Because, he thinks, it’s absurd to be divided into Jews and Russians when together we’re an ethnic minority on the earth. It’s absurd to be divided into … when by the year 2000 all whites will total … and blacks even less than that. But of course, the yellow race! … The Georgians and the Abkhazians—what haven’t they divided! It’s absurd. To be divided into … when for a long time humankind has faced just one common problem. It’s like people lined up to see the doctor, boasting of their diseases. Whose hurts worst. But man cannot be stopped, even though he will understand all. Should he believe in the Second Coming, perhaps? A long time ago, someone did toxic-poisoning experiments on bacteria in an overpopulated habitat, he constructed mathematical curves, and mathematically they coincided with the arms race after the Second World War … Asymptotically approaching universal perdition. The comparison between intelligent man and a bacterium cannot insult the biologist. Reason must still be used with reason … But there’s a catch: the time factor. Is he late or in time? If late, he’s already too late. If in time after all, just barely. Man must push himself even harder to jump onto the last running board … Perhaps it has been necessary for him to hurry so rapaciously with all this armament, for the armament is what has brought in its wake all this technical progress, and without progress, man could not solve the problems of survival he faces … Pavel Petrovich is right. Now is the time to switch aggression to … Only how to switch it? … This the doctor does not believe—that man will come to his senses.

  And the doctor looks at the only person on the beach, an adolescent boy. The boy dives resolutely into the sea and splashes about like a happy dolphin calf.

  Pavel Petrovich has hardly even been gone. As though he kept it buried somewhere nearby.

  “Bulletin,” he reports, panting. “There are no people because there’s a bacillus.”

  “Vas is das?”

  “The sea is polluted. A gigantic discharge of shit.”

  “We must tell the boy,” the doctor says anxiously.

  “You think he doesn’t know?”

  “What about us?”

  “We have our own antiseptic.” Pavel Petrovich shakes the bottle. “A smaller petard, of course,” he states with disappointment.

  Gloomily he takes a drink himself and passes the bottle to the doctor. By now there is something familial in his gestures. As though the two men were sitting in the kitchen.

  “But how catastrophic!” (“Caataastro-o-ophic,” he declaims.) “A fart below, shit above. Imagine how it’s all going to blow up someday!”

  The doctor stares dimly into the marine distance.

  “Let me explain. You yourself got me scared that the hydrogen sulfide was all the way up. Hydrogen sulfide is the same as a fart. And a fart burns. Didn’t you ever set one on fire?”

  “You mean everyone did it?” the doctor asks in surprise. “The whole sea will flame up at once, can you imagine? Whaaat a torch that will be! A pillar of fiiire—that’s what it will be.”

  The doctor giggles. “ ‘The dark blue sea is burning bright, / From the sea the whale takes flight.’ ”

  “Who wrote that?” Pavel Petrovich says, suddenly jealous. “You?”

  “Grandpa Chukovsky.”{55}

  “Wise. Deep. So he, too, foresaw.”

  “It’s for children.”

  “Who else! You can’t explain this to adults. They’ve already failed to understand. Do you know what we’re all going to die of?” This is spoken so meaningfully that the doctor decides not to answer. He waits.

  “We’re going to drown in our own crap!” Pavel Petrovich endures a pause. “And do you know why we’re going to drown?”

  “Because we are crap?” the doctor says gleefully.

  “Wrong! You’re a misanthrope, Doctor Doctorovich! You’ve grown quite antisocial there at home in Germany. People may not be quite such turds as you think.”

  “What, even bigger?”

  “Why, no, my friend. Wrong again. For the time being, smaller. We won’t even have time to develop that far. We’ll drown in it because we don’t know how to use it.”

  “In principle, it’s hard to disagree with your metaphor.”

  “This isn’t a metaphor. Let me explain. What is soil?”

  “So you mean fertilizers,” Doctor D. says, disappointed.

  “Let me amplify. What is coal? You’re silent. Then what is oil?”

  “That’s a correct series. I understand you. Except that the crap we have nowadays is something else. The crap we have nowadays is not shit. It’s chemical, imperishable. The littoral zone is the gills of the sea. It no longer breathes—the surf has wrapped this zone in such a quantity of plastic.”

  “That, too,” Pavel Petrovich says. “We have to create a pig. Before it’s too late.”

  They have another small drink, and Pavel Petrovich initiates the doctor into certain details of his plan for transforming the world.

  “As you realize, the pig here is meant not in the literal—although why not? also in the literal sense of the word. It’s a prototype and symbol. The logo, so to speak, of the project. Project Pig: Retrofitting the World. Sound good?”

  “Sounds good!” Doctor D. joins in enthusiastically.

  “First of all … I don’t know what’s the first of all, because everything’s first of all. Perhaps the hardest thing is to choose what’s first of all. That will be our firstmost problem, Doctor: where to begin. But that comes later … This won’t be easy without a half liter—this won’t make sense without God. It’s harder to prove that He doesn’t exist than that He does. The act of Creation is as provable as a crime. The Creator is caught red-handed, snared at every step. Otherwise, how will you explain the constant ruptures in the chain of evolution, the disappearance of the links that you scientists need in your research? Each time, after all, the key item is the very one missing: logically, here’s where it should be, but it has vanished somewhere. Catastrophes, you say? But why did they happen at the very point you have marked? Yes, exactly: the whole thing is crudely basted together, it barely holds. And lo, the thread is alive! And someone sewed it! What, has to be created is not the crystal lattice but the atom, not life but water, not the elephant but the living cell. And then evolution will suffice, at least up to man. Man can also be produced from the monkey, but in that case it’s hard to make man the sole recipient of virginity—merely for the sake of the idea of original sin and immaculate conception. The German is sly. He invented the monkey. But then he had to invent, not man, but virginity! The Lord hung padlocks on the very places where one thing didn’t tally with another. Which means He was present, He was meddling in his own laws. He is always there as a lawbreaker. And you wrack your brains over the secrets of the universe. Wherever there’s a secret, there’s a lock. A divine secret! And we try to pick the lock. Our knowledge has become a jimmy, and we’re forcing the very locks with which Creation was locked against us, for your own good. We are all imperialists, colonizers. Not America, not Russia, the human species itself is the colonizer of Creation. By the way, man’s calling was to be His Pig. To pick up, clean up, eat up … ”

  Doctor D. brightens. “Bravo!” he says, rubbing his hands. “And to admire! To admire the work of His hands!”

  “To admire … perhaps.” The doctor is on the point of agreeing, when an idea strikes him. “But do you know which is the most ancient surviving profession on earth? If you’re speaking of human callings—in Skovoroda’s terms?”

  “Hunter, probably. Fisherman?”

  “No. Museum worker!” Doctor D. throws Pavel Petrovich a triumphant look.

  “Well, yes, he deals with antiquities … ” Pavel Petrovich finds himself somewhat muddled, to which he is unaccustomed.

  “All right, I’ll give you a hint. What is man’s most ancient tool?”

  “The stick. Warrior! Warrior is the most ancient profession.”

  “All animals fight. Give the stick back to
Engels.{56} Even a monkey knows how to use a stick. Man’s very first tool … ”

  “Well?!”

  “All right, I’ll give you another hint. What is the first garment?”

  “An animal skin.”

  “An animal skin … ” Doctor D. scratches his nose distractedly. “Correct, I guess. I asked the question wrong. What’s the first garment in a more modern sense, down to this day? … That’s wrong … What part of his clothing? … What cut, model, pattern? … Pah! Let me have a drink.”

  “Oh, don’t torture yourself. Doctor Doctorovich. Tell me and be done with it.”

  “Tell you!” Doctor D. is childishly hurt. “That’s no fun. Here! What first garment did man put on, not from cold, or from the rain, or … Damn it, why put clothes on at all?!”

  “A loincloth!”

  “Yes. And why?”

  “Wonderful!” Pavel Petrovich says gleefully. “From shame. Not from cold, but from shame! To hide the privy parts. What did I tell you!”

  “But that’s not what it’s for! What you said about chastity was interesting, but I’m going to double-check. It may be found in some other animal. But chastity wasn’t the reason for the loincloth, not at all.”

  “Well, all right, but what does your museum have to do with this?”

  “Correct. The museum and the loincloth. Do you see the link? No? Now you owe me a bottle.”

  “But we didn’t have a bet. Pavel Petrovich appears to be losing his temper.

  “All right. Man’s first calling was gatherer. Roots, nuts … And the first tool he himself invented—which became the loincloth—was the pocket! In his passion for collecting, man’s most ancient instinct.”

  “Oh! I’m a fool, a fool!”

  “Made a monkey of you. didn’t I?”

  “The pocket, I agree. I’ll get even with you for this. This is easy, getting something from your professional reading and then torturing a person.”

  “I didn’t get it from my reading!”

  “What, you thought of it yourself?”

  “I did. I was collecting amber on the shore at home and thought of it. When I was stuffing the amber into my swimming trunks.”

  “My compliments. Then I owe you a bottle. Although … Let’s take it further. If the first garment is the pocket, then what’s even earlier than the pocket?”