by Andrei Bitov
With these words Pavel Petrovich tears his shirt open to expose a chicken god.
“The cord had to be replaced, of course. Would you like me to give it to you?”
“Oh, Lord!” the weary doctor groans. “How stupid everything is. Stupid, stupid, stupid!”
“You don’t believe me? Take it, take it!” the very kind Pavel Petrovich insists.
“Do you vouch for the authenticity of the hole?”
“Almost. It may prove to be even more ancient.”
“The hole? More ancient than the Stone Age?”
The doctor does not believe a single word—in this particular case, wrongly. Pavel Petrovich hints that the interesting organs may have been stolen by the “organs” themselves, the secret police, for another preservation laboratory, also secret, which attends to the sexual health of the leadership apparatus. Apropos, he begins to tell another trustworthy story: how he himself once ended up in a ward in a VIP hospital, in a department of that very kind, he was working as a blaster and a stone caught him right in the …
But he no longer has time to tell the story, because they have reached a city—namely, the capital of sunny and hospitable Abkhazia, the city of Sukhum. Their triumph over space is greeted by the municipal brass band, performing “Amur Waves.”
“So this is what we mean by ‘brass pipes’!” the doctor says in delight. “I’ve always wondered what that meant. Fire and water I could understand, but what were the brass pipes? And it turns out they’re glory! Meaning fanfares. Meaning triumph.”
“An extremely doubtful interpretation!” Pavel Petrovich says sullenly.
“There can’t be any other,” the doctor exults. “Why didn’t I guess before!”
“Why can’t there be?” Pavel Petrovich says, perking up. “There most certainly can. The expression ‘to go through fire, water, and brass pipes’ is no metaphor: it’s a technical description of a still.”
The doctor will gleefully accept the new etymology. Because by now they are getting very close to the Hotel Abkhazia. The snow-white beauty Abkhazia, so felicitously built by Academician Shchusev himself in precisely this, and no other, spot. And there in the Abkhazia, the doctor claims, is his friend and colleague the Ainglishman, an expert on settling monkeys in the West under unsuitable climatic conditions. He has plenty of everything, all kinds of whiskey-shmiskey, gin-and-tonic-shmonic. No chacha, though.
But disappointment awaits them. They are not admitted to the hotel. Possibly because of their appearance. True, they haven’t been insulted yet, the police haven’t been called, they are not admitted simply as unauthorized persons, in keeping with the sign, which says in red and white UNAUTHORIZED PERSONS NOT … Happily at this point Dragamashchenka, who is in a dismal mood, and movie director Sersov, who feels marvelous …
And all of them are admitted to the hotel unimpeded.
Dragamashchenka has a talk with Doctor D., the director with Pavel Petrovich. The Englishman, for whom Dragamashchenka, as it turns out, bears direct responsibility, has had something awful happen; the director offers Pavel Petrovich a role in his upcoming film. In the night, in a dream but also in reality, the plywood ceiling collapsed on the Englishman. No, he himself was unhurt, he simply couldn’t tell whether he was asleep or awake. Because the plywood fell on him along with a rat and the cat who was chasing the rat. He decided that delirium tremens had set in. He demanded immediate deportation. They’re so principled, these English. He insisted on it, and was evacuated on an emergency basis—by now with indisputable symptoms of delirium tremens. And as ill luck would have it, Dragamashchenka had just succeeded in arranging, at last, a trip to the monkey settlements for him.
The movie director, at this very moment, is moving into the vacated room.
And no whiskey-shmiskey … Pavel Petrovich quickly agrees to the new role in director Sersov’s film.
“I know where we’ll go,” he comforts Doctor D. “To my friend Semyon.” (He pronounces this name somehow strangely, with slow significance: perhaps Simeon, perhaps Simyon.) “I didn’t expect to meet him here. Suddenly I looked—and there he was!”
But it turns out this isn’t so close. It’s rather far from Sukhum, in the large, spread-out village of Tamysh. They curse the city and discuss the charms of village life. Crime is growing in the cities and there’s no use fighting it, because it’s a biological factor. Punitive measures are inevitable. Therefore the tribunal will exist for a while longer, after they have transformed mankind, but capital punishment will gradually be replaced by mere exile to the cities, which will also fulfill their useful function of garbage pits. The filtration and purification of the all will be performed in them, and the city will at last find its natural purpose. The city will become the Great Pig of the Future!
But this will not be soon … And Tamysh turns out to be far away.
“Some believe, and some do not believe … ” Pavel Petrovich is coated with dust, as if with fur: his eyebrows, his stubbly beard, even his hands. “Some overthrow an idol, and some create one for themselves. But I … I delight in the Lord! I am delighted by Him Himself! And not only as the Creator … That, of course, passes understanding, how beautifully He produced all this. What delights me in Him is something else … ”
Wearily they trudge along the endless highway. Doctor D. plods uncomplainingly, a little behind, as if on a leash. Peers over HIS shoulder. Inspects the dust on his hand with surprise.
“Humanity! That’s the astonishing thing … He bears responsibility for His every mistake. He is present. It’s such a mistake on man’s part to cast Him far away, to a heaven! He’s here! We’ll never understand this. He sent us His Son as proof—we didn’t understand that, either. And if we’re a mistake, He has adopted that mistake. He has set us above everything in this world! Above the angels and archangels! Because they’re mere creatures, even though of a higher order, while we’re His children. You say that Adam is our forefather. No! He, too, is merely God’s creature, because he was not His Son. We’re grandchildren of Adam, but children of the Lord. And He has been waiting a long time. He needs us. He still hopes. He believes in us. Can you imagine what faith He has! But we’ve lost faith, we believe in anything at all except Him. We proclaim His covenants, commandments, and laws, we threaten ourselves with them. We’ve scared ourselves with the Lord, as a boss who would judge and punish us. But that’s not what He needs from us. He’d like a bit of our faith and love. A bit of answering affection for a father … Haven’t you noticed that the father is always the least-caressed person in the family? He works and works and works. Or drinks and drinks and drinks. And simply comes to naught, with never a respite. Papa!” Pavel Petrovich lets out a sob. “Forgive me!”
He glances about him. “Well, here we are at our goal,” he says, immediately calm. “It won’t be long now. I want you to understand where our common mistake lies. Whether you believe or not is of no consequence. You’re a man. But He … He got blown to bits by His Creation, or by a land mine. He’s not above us, He’s in us. We and He are one. And what we must do is not bow down before Him, or squirm in self-abasement, or construct a God-man from ourselves, but become Him, Himself.” Again he glances about. “And now the cemetery is within sight … Just a stone’s throw from here.”
From the cemetery comes a lament, a moderate one, not loud or heartrending.
They are burying Senyok, Semyon, Simyon, or Simeon. He disappeared, and they missed him only on the third day. They found him in the ruined church—the same one, seventh-century, next to the prison—already stiff, with the inconsolable rat rushing around beside him. He was wearing his red shirt and hugging a big three-liter bottle of chacha, which he had stolen from Mama Natella. It is she who weeps so unpremeditatedly, so honestly and steadily: Didn’t I pour for him? Wouldn’t I have given it to him anyway? … He never finished it off—he reached the midpoint. But neither did he part with it. Someone even speaks in favor of burying them together. Then it is decided to use these very lefto
vers as his funeral repast.
“Remember, Doctor,” Pavel Petrovich says sternly. “The hair of the dog that bit you is everything you drank the day before.” The doctor is still refusing—he keeps struggling to get to the neighboring sanatorium. A certain associate … you should have seen the way her son looked at me in the morning … But the doctor no longer has any willpower.
“Why do you keep tromping like Napoleon!” Pavel Petrovich says, rhythmically knocking his forehead against the lid of the simple coffin.
And Doctor D. breaks down.
“But why are you crying so, Doctor?”
“I pictured the biomass of the worms … ”
Such was the death of a Russian drifter, the Holy Fool Senyok-Simyon.
And here at the modest funeral repast, over the fresh grave, Pavel Petrovich lost Doctor D. and blacked out. A body on the lawn. Peace. The soul conversing with the body, the body with God. The empty bottle conversing with the grass:
“Want!”
“Here.”
III. FIRE
1. The Cat
The question of who I was had become unusually topical.
HE was going downhill—I was suffering a comedown.
The reunion sufficed for about three days. The embraces unclasped. A telephone call told HIM what he was worth, and I concurred. I had extended the autumn, and now winter was all the more wintry. Yet another November anniversary{62} was blowing in through the windows—the sixty-fifth? sixty-sixth? sixty-seventh. The three days became three years, and the three years flew by like three days. My fur coat fell apart on me. I had never realized what comfort cost! Even eyeglasses can wear thin on your nose, like shoe soles—why bemoan your shoes? Cockroaches converged on the apartment. Snot enveloped me like a conflagration, there were handkerchiefs drying on the radiators. I kept waking up from unfrightening, tiresome nightmares, less and less distinguishable from life.
At first I’d be asleep, things would seem to be all right. Doorbell. I answer it. They apologize, they’ve come to the wrong place. Never mind, it’s all right. I go back to bed and lie down. Damnation! I forgot to turn out the hall light. It’s beating in under the door. I go to turn it out, and there they are in the kitchen, with a nice cake, having tea. Very peaceable; they explain that seeing as they have the wrong address, and they’ve come on the train especially for a housewarming, well, either way, they’ll do it at my place, and won’t I sit down. I say something about well, it’s somehow … and they say never mind, it’s all right, don’t go to any trouble. And all of them so round, provincial, unexcitable, bashful-looking, but brazen. Already they’re off to answer the doorbell themselves, and it’s some more just like them, and again with cakes. I shove them out, and they grow listless, speechless, they topple over, I’m tangled up in them, stuck, more and more frenzied. I toss out a whole landingful of quilted jackets, felt boots, winter caps with earflaps—those caps were no better than floor rags anyway. The minute I lie down again the wardrobe starts to creak, the window vent swings open, sparks shoot from all the cracks, and there’s a whiff of smoke. I ought to close the window vent—I no longer have strength to get up. And already there’s a quilted jacket crawling in through the window vent, he’s muttering, he has lost his cap with earflaps. He bumps into my wardrobe in the corner, and the bust of Napoleon on the wardrobe starts to topple off. I barely catch it to keep it from breaking. I’m stuffing the quilted man back through the window vent; he expanded when he crawled in, and I can’t stuff him back. Sparks shower as from a welding torch, Napoleon gleams bronze in their light, but he has empty eye sockets, as in antique statues. How did I come to have a Napoleon? I’ve never had a Napoleon in all my born days! He’s never stood on my wardrobe … I toss out the idol, too, after the quilted man, and carefully close the window vent, but outside the door there is already a hullabaloo, a racket, a commotion—they turn on the light and make merry.
Snot was choking me. I would wake in terror, turn on the real light, but in the same room, and reach for my twisted lump of a handkerchief. Cockroaches would dash out of it.
So this is what it means to be a dissident, I would think with a grin. The main thing was not to confuse the initial phases with the final ones. AIDS was coming into style. No resistance. The snuffles turned into a cough, and the cough into diarrhea. The surveillance methods and my persecution mania coincided. The initial symptoms led to random connections, and the random connections to alcoholism. My soul, not having had its hair-of-the-dog, thirsted to confess. It had someone to confess to, but nothing to confess. In one instance you would become a madman, in the other an émigré. I wanted neither. But still, the KGB was better than AIDS, and I mustn’t confuse them. My fame was growing.
People kept visiting HIM. Now wenches, now vagabonds. The vagabonds came, literally, straight from the station. Like the ghost in the old joke, I live there—live there! … Someone woke me bright and early: straight off the train. Our encounter resembled the encounter of two tomcats in a doorway. Not without dignity. One could hardly find his reflection in the mirror, the other had an eye on his cheek. Not without rules. For example, take off your shoes in the vestibule and follow me across the grubby floor, right into the kitchen. While I pretended to wash, I was actually considering what to do now, passing my unwashed hand over my grizzled stubble with annoyance. The briefcase he had brought was bigger than he was. His entire property, no less. I can date his appearance precisely. The Korean airliner had just been downed;{63} the day before, an international book fair had opened, and I had met with a Swedish publisher. The Swede was from Amnesty International, and his eyes expressed bewilderment, as if I were somehow behaving incorrectly. As if to say I wasn’t in prison yet. The last time, too, he had asked insistently how he could help me. I had disappointed him by saying that all I needed was glasses “like the Beatles’.” And here I was, sitting across from my uninvited guest in my Swedish glasses.
“Half a million is yours,” he said, opening the briefcase.
How simple! I thought delightedly.
At last they were trying to buy me. My pride was put in its place: couldn’t they have sent someone a little more convincing?
He took a toothbrush out of his briefcase, and then a whole manuscript. It was in four folders, each of which was in a separate cellophane bag, plus wrapped in a kind of parchment.
“So,” I said, taking charge of the situation. “How long were you in prison?”
“Eight years. Almost eight … ”
“How long did it take you to write this?”
“A year. Almost a year … ”
“How many pages in it?”
“Eight hundred. Almost. A little less.”
“And you want me to read this in a day?”
“But you won’t be able to put it down!”
It turns out you don’t even have to take charge of the situation, if it’s yours to start with. Who has read this? You’ll be the first. How did you find me? Through the address bureau. Have you, er, read me? Uh, no, I heard about you by word of mouth. And what makes you think they’ll lay a million on you? Oh, at least a million …
His naïveté was equaled only by his experience. He had gone to prison when he wasn’t even fourteen. It cost me a mental effort to realize that this was who he was. That he had been sent by no one but himself.
“Why the parchment?”
“In case it gets thrown in the water. I’ve thought of every thing. I can still set a Guinness record. I can do five thousand deep knee bends. I can’t right now, without getting in shape. But I can do two thousand for sure, right in your presence. He squatted down then and there, in his socks.
I surrendered. “Spare me.”
And I couldn’t put it down …
His eye had been shot out, back in his rural childhood, because he refused to kiss a kitten under the tail. He had learned to do deep knee bends in the punishment cell, to keep from freezing to death. He was in love for life with his grade school classmate, Vera, b
ut had dared to declare his love only from prison, after buying a photo from a good-looking cellmate. And he received an affirmative answer to his declaration—when he opened Vera’s letter, a snapshot of her buxom older sister fell out. He decided to escape in order to get married. Having learned the regulations, he yelled to the guard, “Do not fire on a juvenile!”—and caught a bullet in the shoulder. He kept on running and felt that his arm had been completely torn off. The wounded arm was on the side without an eye, and he couldn’t see it. Then he took hold of it in the other hand and raised it to the other eye as he ran, to make sure …
I was perishing—people kept trying to save HIM. She gave him a kitten, Tishka. Her mittens and fur hat were bigger than she was. And Tishka was even smaller than her mittens. I kissed her on her cold fur hat, on her mitten, on Tishka. Hurry!
Someone disturbed us. Who could this be? I wasn’t expecting him at all. A man unique on this earth, in his way. Just like me. Parents—they’re only half like you, each like his own half. But this man was just like me, like both halves. My brother, then. Although a Georgian. He was a year ahead of me.
He mustn’t see her, she mustn’t hear him. It was a one-room apartment. I hid her in the wardrobe, just as she was: in her shirt and fur hat. He was continuing to degenerate into a woman. In proof of which he had grown a beard. Women no longer interested him, as a man. For a year now he had been scouring the medical literature. This was a very rare genetic disease, which was why he felt obliged to warn me. So that from now on I could choose the right parents.
That in itself was a long story. Then he disappeared.
She emerged from the wardrobe wearing only her mittens. Her nipples smelled of naphthalene.
Tishka was the one who had it best. He slept on my jumbled manuscripts.