by Andrei Bitov
“That’s the stick, now.”
Pavel Petrovich cannot hide his glee. “Don’t take it away from Engels. I returned it to him forever. Well? It’s your own idea! How did he tie the pocket on? … A knot! When the monkey thought to tie knots—that’s when he became man. Now take it further. You answer me, now. And again, for a bottle. A question no harder than yours. And again, my own discovery. When I worked part-time at a furniture store, moving furniture, I always wondered, how did man invent such inconvenient things? So. Tell me, what was the first furniture, from which everything originated?”
“A chair? More likely, a stool?”
“No-o.”
“A bed? More likely, a hammock?”
“No-o.”
“What do you mean?” Doctor D. is incensed. “Why, as soon as man stood up on two legs, his backbone got tired. Osteochondrosis is an atavistic disease, by the way; did you know? So he sat down, on a stone.”
“A stone,” Pavel Petrovich says, “is not a stool. And a tree branch isn’t yet a hammock. That way I’ll write off your pocket as cheek pouches. No, you tell me, what was the first furniture he created?”
“A table?”
“No-o.”
“Not a wardrobe!”
“All right, I’ll give you a hint. A wardrobe is getting warmer.” Doctor D. sinks into a deep reverie. Table? chair? bed? “There’s no other furniture.”
“Give up?”
“Yes.”
Pavel Petrovich solemnly reveals his secret: “A trunk!”
“Why a trunk?”
“To hide your nuts and roots! The trunk is the proto-furniture. Everything comes from it. Sit, and it’s a bench. Lie down—a bed. Put a cloth on it—a table. Stand it on end—a wardrobe.”
“Hang a lock on it—a god,” the doctor says sarcastically.
“Now don’t get all upset. We’re quits. I don’t owe you, and you don’t owe me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I say, I won back the bottle. And you needn’t speak ironically of locks. Our job now is to mend them.”
“But who’s going to do it?”
“The military-industrial complex! You yourself mention the atomic bomb. What’s left for them to do now? All these missiles and planes will become scrap metal, matter expended in vain. They already have, the military and the people just don’t know it yet. What has always brought technical progress in its wake? War. It will never bring progress again. What to do, then, with the aggressive human genius, where to find an occupation according to its affinity? Will you ever force the knight to beat his swords into plowshares, make pots and pans out of his armor? Humankind doesn’t plan to become better. It will soon have no place to hide: there’s going to be a kind of worldwide siphon, through all those holes in the sky … And our military will shift from attack to defense. They’ll busy themselves with inventing the Pig. The idea of non-polluting manufacture is as alluring in its unattainability as a flight to Mars. If something’s impossible—what more does genius need? Non-polluting manufacture is just as much of a black hole as war. That’s where we can throw all our money, all our energy, and all our talent!”
“I wasn’t expecting such optimism from such an intelligent man,” Doctor D. says. His face, as he speaks, wears a very happy expression.
“Nowadays the world has grown so vulgar that a pessimist is always wise. An optimist is either self-interested or a fool. There are no people. Only the fucking critics.”
“Dear Pavel Petrovich!’ Doctor D. is in tears. “Believe me, I am unspeakably happy! This, may I say, is the first time in my life that I have found support for everything I have left unspoken … Pavel Petrovich! Allow me to kiss you!” He attempts to lay his cheek to Pavel Petrovich’s lips, but somehow nothing comes of it. He just barely keeps his balance in this difficult new space and does not succeed in superposing the two projections. “Allow me to drink to you!”
“I allooow!” says Pavel Petrovich, pouring for Doctor D. “And to yourself, my pet, as well.”
They clink glasses.
And they set off down the shore, arms around each other, almost as one man.
“ … And there’ll be compulsory military conscription!” Doctor D. is saying. “The soldiers will carry out alternative service. Plant and conserve forests! Raise animals, fish, and birds!”
“Lenin we’ll bury outside the church pale, like a suicide,” Pavel Petrovich is saying. “But the mausoleum—no, we won’t destroy it, we’ll preserve it! We’ll sink a deep shaft in it and fence it with a velvet barrier, like in a theater. People will approach, peer down into this maw, breathe the sepulchral chill, and remember the millions murdered. We won’t destroy any monuments at all, not even Kalinin’s. We’ll bury Dzerzhinsky, too. And again, we’ll sink a shaft under him and drop him in. Vertically. And roll asphalt on top. Lay out a flower bed. We’ll have the world’s first underground monument. I make this assertion as a sculptor.”
“But all the other monuments,” Doctor D. joins in, “all the boy buglers and girl athletes, the Sverdlovs and Marxes, the Lenins, Lenins, Lenins … and all the Stalins in the courtyards and cellars … and in the Lenin Hills … we’ll collect them all and cart them to some one place … and make a kind of Disneyland of our own, for hard currency … they’ll stand like Chinese soldiers … a whole army was dug up somewhere in the Gobi, not long ago … we’ll cart them off to Kara Kum and Kyzyl Kum—”
“No need to insult the desert! I know a better spot. Nothing will ever grow there anymore. There’s a spot like that near Baku, where they used to extract oil. That’s where we’ll send them.”
“Windmills … solar batteries … ” the doctor babbles.
“And the main thing, my NUALRU Plan! Alcoholization of Russia. National, Universal! The state can’t be restored without the rebirth of the people. The people can’t exist without beer. They degenerate. Without beer the nation will become totally besotted. What’s the sense of combating alcoholism, especially by Bolshevik methods. You can’t go against nature. We’re a drinking people, we drink anyway. But good God, what we drink! And so, a categorical prohibition against all our cheap fruit wines. Vodka, too, to be of the highest purity only. Fine grape wines, of course. Cognacs, for those who like them. And the revival and universal development of brewing! That’s the main thing! Revived pubs and taverns—these will be steps on the staircase of civilization. The drunken peasant will beat his woman because the kitchen hasn’t been cleaned up, not because he hates his own life. Pubs must become such that daily life is attracted to them, so that we’ll have a model of cleanliness and quality, so that we’ll be ashamed of the way we look and live! Can you imagine, in the Kremlin, in the office of the General Secretary—our Andropov, God grant him health!—on the wall of his Stalinesque office, a map of our sixth of the earth, encrusted with semiprecious stones (the expense won’t break us), and under the stones, lightbulbs. Andropov presses a button on the control panel. A little star lights up somewhere on Kamchatka. ‘Congratulations, comrades!’ he says. ‘Yet another first-class Palace of Beer Culture has opened in the settlement of Klyuchi!’ (That’s not far from the Avacha volcano, have you ever been there?) ‘But don’t rest content, comrades,’ he says. ‘The NUALRU Plan is proceeding at a slow, slow pace! Reactionary forces are resisting its progress, covertly and overtly. In some places they’re still diluting the beer, comrades! They don’t let the foam settle!’ ”
Doctor D. purses his lips in disdain. “Do you like Andropov?”
“Well, but the man thinks nationally! He’s made vodka less than five rubles again. Old Crankshaft. Have you tried it? It’s not the greatest vodka, of course, but it’s 4.70. You’ve got something left over for cheese and the Metro. He’s allowed stoves on garden plots. This is a major matter! He’s allowed vendors at the trains again: potatoes, dill! But the main point is, he’s allowed a monastery in Moscow! Beer palaces and monasteries! That’s what will resurrect agriculture! Ecologically safe farms
. Small ones, producing ecologically safe food—that’s our future! Exports will grow. Gold will flow. We’ll buy up cheap food products from them in exchange for our expensive ones—and save and save!”
“We ourselves don’t eat, you mean?”
“Personally, I’d just as soon the grub didn’t exist at all.”
“You eat absolutely nothing?”
“You might say that. Except perhaps to be sociable … ”
“A most interesting case! I was recently told by a colleague … A very talented physician and biologist, incidentally. He’s at some top-secret place, the Laboratory for the Preservation of Lenin, I think. They have excellent equipment there … To make a long story short, he’s busy developing a hangover tablet, for our spies, probably. So he says that four out of a hundred chronic alcoholics live into old age without getting hit by a bus or sticking their hands into pulleys and gears. They fulfill or maybe even overfulfill the norm and the Plan, they don’t commit violations of social order—except that they absolutely don’t snack, they don’t eat anything at all. They contrive to get from pure alcohol everything they need for physical vitality. Still more surprising, they produce normal children, on whom the parent’s alcoholism has no effect. True, science so far has not established whether these surprising traits are hereditary.”
“They are,” Pavel Petrovich affirms confidently. “I had a grandfather like that, too. I can’t vouch for my great-grandfather.” He scowls suddenly. “So what are you saying, you think I’m an alcoholic?”
“Good heavens, yes! Such an alcoholic!”
“I am not an alcoholic!” Pavel Petrovich says indignantly.
“You always return,” Doctor D. states, “return to the thought, to the theme, return with a bottle. You’re not an alcoholic—you’re the man of the future! In biology, four percent is a gigantic figure! Far more significant than the remaining ninety-six percent. Because it’s already a mutation! And in our age, with mankind half-starving, with food and natural resources short, we can bet on such a mutation. Because a man who, like an automobile, fills up on fuel (incidentally, a fuel far cheaper and more unlimited than gasoline) is exceptionally promising from the standpoint of ecology and economics. These four out of a hundred may prove to have a great future.”
“Future!” Pavel Petrovich says darkly.
And they begin to speak of Orwell. Of the unforgettable year 1984.{57} Will Russia, they ask, live to see the year of the future? … Here, out of respect for the censorship, I omit their conclusions. Although I can’t help observing, for the future, that one of the interlocutors intensely dislikes Orwell, while the other finds in him … I name no names.
“Your Lorenz is more convincing,” Pavel Petrovich concludes, even more darkly. “In a minute, in a minute! You’ll see for yourself.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you in any way,” the doctor says apologetically.
“I didn’t mean to distress you. I had intended to bypass this … But unfortunately we’ve already arrived. Here, beyond this breakwater … ”
“What’s that?” the doctor asks in a whisper, so that only the a’s issue from his lips: “Wha-a-a-a? ..
‘‘How do you like that for a monument to the sea?”
“That”—huge, white, shapeless—lies submissively on the shore. The tide has washed it up to the piling of the breakwater.
“This is the third day she’s been lying here … ”
There is a lot of her. A cow is not this large. She is like a whale. She does not shimmer with mother-of-pearl or even walleye white. The light flows around her, forming pools. Sky, sea—the light falling on the cow comes from all around. No one has noticed the time changing—like the weather. White, gray, sunless … She has thought of nothing for a long while now.
“This is right at the boundary of two habitats, between two sanatoriums,” Pavel Petrovich explains. “The Railroad Ministry’s and the Central Trade Union Council’s. Or vice versa. So they can’t straighten out whose jurisdiction it is. Any fool can tell whose jurisdiction it is! Now you see what I meant about the pendulum, what I meant about ni-i-i-ight! … Which is dead, which is deader? Time, unstopping? or the life in it, dwindling since birth?! No, time is the corpse! It’s time that’s dead! Like the cow. And the pendulum is not the stride of time—where could it go?—but the boundary of eternal life and eternal death. The pendulum carries us from that life into this death, like a larva; we suffer metamorphoses, and we use them to measure death, like time … Explosion and Chaos! That’s the reference model, that’s the starting point—that’s what I’ve been trying to drive home to you … ”
But Doctor D. probably does not hear him. He looks about him with a somehow white and deafened stare. His stare is like the cow. He sees the two sanatoriums. He sees a fisherman who has cast his line on the far side of the breakwater—the man’s back may be turned, but the cow is just a stone’s throw away from him. He sees a flock of daring beach girls, unenthusiastically playing volleyball in a circle. A creature with two legs, no breasts, and a mustache approaches them, and they start playing more gaily.
“My God!” groans Doctor D. “What are they walking on!”
And he sprints into the sedges near the shore …
He returns tall, pale, and resolute.
“I know where.”
“Then let’s go.” Pavel Petrovich is not about to argue.
And they abandon the sea. They walk. They no longer have far to go.
But the doctor is extremely unwell.
“Captain, Captain, hold on,” Pavel Petrovich hums solicitously, supporting him with his words and by the elbow. “Well, the cow … Well, how to comfort you? … Would you like me to reveal a state secret to you? The authentic version of The Knight in the Tiger Skin?{58} … In 1978, just at the very height of the Abkhazian events{59}—which were also classified as secret, by the way—some tourists found that skin. Moreover, along with the knight. Again at the boundary of two habitats: a glacier and a moraine. But there was a fresh wound on the skull.{60} Their instructor happened to be experienced; he forbade any further use of the ice ax and hurried down to report. But this glacier, in turn, was the natural boundary between two regions, one Mingrelian and the other Abkhazian. Who wanted to claim responsibility for the murder of a Russian tourist? The Mingrelians maintained that the body had been found on the Abkhazian side; the Abkhazians, expectably, on the Mingrelian side. The tourist center certified that not one of their Russian tourists had disappeared. Then, of course, the question arose whether he was a Mingrelian or an Abkhaz. If a Mingrelian had murdered an Abkhaz, the Abkhazian side wanted the body. Either to avenge it or to institute proceedings. But the Mingrelian side wasn’t sure but what an Abkhaz hadn’t murdered a Mingrelian. In that case, let them turn over both the body and the proceedings. Confused as to who was who, they summoned a commission of local history experts: was he a Mingrelian or an Abkhaz? But the knight proved more ancient than the existing administrative and territorial division. The tourists had done a job with their ice ax, but all the same he was very well preserved, in his tiger skin, for back in those days there were still tigers in this locality. The tiger skin, too, was well preserved, as were the tall goatskin hat à la Robinson Crusoe and, most importantly, his weapons: the knife, the javelin, and the arrows with, significantly, bone tips. And no one had murdered anyone! He himself, poor fool, had gotten caught in an avalanche. However, when it turned out that neither side bore any direct criminal liability, the quarrel flared up in an even more basic form. Establishing his ethnic affiliation would mean resolving the ancient ‘quarrel of the Slavs among themselves’: who was the real native and who was not. While people from Tbilisi were flying in to see him, the knife and the amulet he wore next to his skin disappeared—and a round-the-clock guard, made up of representatives of both sides, was posted. A visiting poet put forward a brilliant idea based on the tall hat, and imparted it secretly to the ear of the chief of the commission. The hypothesis didn’t hold water—b
ut the anniversary celebration of the immortal epic was coming up, with UNESCO and the Hall of Columns, and the president didn’t risk ignoring a proposition like this. Besides, the body, which had lain there in peace throughout its six or eight thousand years, was now being subjected to contemporary influences for the third day. There was also the matter of protecting the tiger skin from the local history experts. An army helicopter showed up in short order, and the participants were required to sign a non-divulgence statement. An inquest was held in Tbilisi. He would have confessed both that he was Shota and that he was Avtandil{61}—no place to frigging hide. Certainly he would have confessed that he wasn’t an Abkhaz. But the trouble was, this was the first man ever to come down to us in such a state of preservation—that is, much more of a world event than any literary jubilee. While a Moscow commission from the Preservation Laboratory at the Mausoleum was flying in, the knight, who was being kept sealed in the central morgue, suffered the disappearance not only of his tiger skin but also—incredibly-—of all his male equipage. The scandal was becoming truly international. If we concealed a discovery of this magnitude from the world, we could be purged wholesale from all international associations, including that same UNESCO—not just from a few anthropological associations. Not to mention human rights! It became clear that to preserve him, especially in secret, in his already somewhat spoiled state, would cost our homeland thousands of dollars a day, even if we evacuated him on an emergency basis to Moscow—but didn’t lay him next to … It would be cheaper to send a special expedition to some place like Switzerland, where we could plant him under a local glacier, and there he would be found by our mountain climbers, preserving for our fatherland the honor of the discovery … But this scheme, too, ran into a whole string of technical difficulties, including customs and passport control. And the knight was classified irrevocably, that is, he disappeared, although the investigation of the tiger skin has continued, and some progress in this direction has occurred: a neck amulet was requisitioned, in the form of a stone with a little Stone Age hole. By chance I received the amulet as a gift.”