by Andrei Bitov
At this point I rose and began to wind up the press conference. I recommended that they would do better to consult D., who wrote on science. He had both authority and strength, and what was I, I was a little man. I had no such connections, and it was unprofitable to aim the cannon, such an expensive one, at me. What, don’t you know that he’s an associate of ours? they said, trying a new device. “I would never have thought it. As liberal as they come—and a collaborator?! Why, it can’t be!” It can, it can. “Thanks for warning me.” None of that, now, they said, picking up their eavesdropping briefcase from both sides and shooing off the heroic Tishka. What’s the matter, do you think they’re bugging you? and they nodded toward my mop. Then you’re already off! “Meaning what, may I ask?” Meaning, off your rocker! “You know what you can—” I said menacingly. We do indeed know, you naive fellow. Why, they’ll simply drive a nail through your wall and stand watch at night. Highly entertaining, the way the intelligentsia tumble in the sheets.
I jerked out the mop in a fit of rage, but hard as I looked I found no nail.
The place smelled of fish, shit, and roses.
At that point my wife even returned—to visit Tishka. My willingness to forgive all was exhausted then and there.
“And aren’t you ashamed to invite girls to such a shit hole?”
Good heavens! what girls? what made her think … ? She sniffed again.
“What whores you bring home!”
Somewhere I had read that perfume was based on the same molecule. I decided to tell her the whole truth.
“You’re lying again, like two men! You think I know nothing about perfume?”
This was ours, this was our own, and this was all. She slammed the door.
Dear God! What do you all want from me? What am I, sweet or something? Can’t you see that I’m already totally gone? Or are you drawn by the very smell of carrion? Attracted by the death agony? Do you want to snatch away the last of my vital forces? Drag the threads of me off to your ratholes?? What exactly haven’t I given you enough of? … But what have I given, that I’ve been stingy with? … You’ve given nothing, in point of fact, to anyone. You’ve only disillusioned them all. Medicine to your brother? Medicine was not what he needed, and his wife was right to throw it in the garbage: it was no good, didn’t help. The Eye needed a million, he was even ready to give away half of it—you didn’t give him his million. Did the homeless gay want recognition for his story, or something more? You gave him neither. The provocateurs required your consent to collaborate—you didn’t even go for that. You’re writing a novel, you say? Why, only Dryunya needs your novel—but you haven’t written it, even for him. Is your briefcase empty? Is it? Why else did you crown him with the sugar bowl? Well, all right, I agree, I didn’t give them what they wanted from me … but what did they give me!? But what did you want? Why, I didn’t want anything from them!! There, you see. They wanted—and they gave you themselves. But I never even asked. You never asked, but they gave. But I … but didn’t I … didn’t I give them myself?! You did not, you put yourself at their disposal. Why are you now outraged that they used you? Who are you? just who are you to … ? Who are you without them, without your ragged one-eyed troops? You don’t love me, that’s what. What do you mean I don’t love you, darling? You don’t love anyone. I! … don’t love? … Or your mother—where’s your mother? And the children … where are your children? Go ahead, hit me, just you try, hit me. Hit me, darling, at least hit me …
What do you mean I don’t love you? how can you say such a thing? what do you mean I don’t love you! when I love you so, so, so-o much that … that I don’t even know what … well, and then why do I hurt so much, if I’m as unfeeling as you say? Tishka, oh my Tishka, my little Tishka, oh why does she talk such rot …
I kissed Tishka’s little face, which was sharp with bewilderment—there wasn’t much left of him in my arms at all, only a bit of fur, and inside it just a tiny ball no bigger than our heart … But suddenly his eyes went blank, he scratched me, lunged out of my arms, fell to the floor, and began writhing on his side, beating his paws as though racing in another dimension into an unknown space. For a long moment he hurtled across my spat-upon linoleum, along some insane evolute: in a circle and forward and in a circle again. He ended up in the opposite corner of the room, under the wardrobe from which Napoleon had fallen in my dream. Tishka, little Tishka, what’s wrong? He was alive, though. He was all wet, a third his own size, but his flank was heaving, he was breathing.
I telephoned her. “Tishka.” I said. She arrived immediately, as though she had been standing outside the door. Tishka, however, had managed to recover completely; in a most amusing fashion, he was playing that my dried-out lump of a handkerchief was a mouse. I had lied, it appeared, for the sole purpose of calling her over. But it turned out that this suited her perfectly. Thus, it suited us both. We dispensed with explanations. I cannot recall how it later developed, nevertheless, that I was at fault after all, having lured her with Tishka.
But the minute she slammed the door, or perhaps not that minute but an hour later, or perhaps the next day—I remember nothing—all I remember is that Tishka was writhing again in his falling sickness, like Dostoevsky. I called her, she hung up. I called everyone I could, trying to ascertain whether cats get epilepsy. Among others, I called Zyablikov, a great expert on animals. Cats, he said, get everything people do, except perhaps not hangover: did I have anything for a hair-of-the-dog? I did not, I didn’t have even a kopeck. The mezzo-soprano, as always, rescued me. She said it was worms, wrote down how to get rid of them, and gave me some money.
I remember nothing. At first it even seemed to be getting better, and hope dawned, and the worms even came out. I went around with a rag all the time and washed up. Never in my life had my floor been so clean. But his fits became longer and more frequent, I couldn’t watch. If you have ever, even once in your life, lived forty-five years under the Soviet Regime, you know. You know how the emergency medic arrives. Especially the veterinarian. Rag in hand, I rushed to open the door, but it was the Eye with his manuscript. On his own he had taken his briefcase to the Hammer Center (how had they let him in! but they had), and there he had offered his novel to the Italians at the next table, for only a hundred thousand now; he was nabbed, of course, but he had time to dump his notebook, and he swallowed the paper with my phone number, and they let him go. Well, Dryunya and Saltyk, they practically never left; the young woman who had once come with roses resolutely took back her manuscript; the drifter in the Zaporozhets had something else he’d forgotten to ask me; an assistant film director I had met in Sukhum, not so long ago, phoned from Baku, inviting me to fly out immediately and take one of the central roles … no, not The Lady with the Lapdog, the script has been thoroughly rewritten, the action takes place in Central Asia during the war … yes, you might say it’s a unique retro … no, the director can’t even contemplate anyone else for this role, he apologizes for being unable to phone you himself, he’s shooting a sandstorm just now … no, of course Baku isn’t in Central Asia, but this is a movie, you know how it is … no, he saw you, and he needs an aristocratic look … don’t laugh, those are his words, that you had acquired an uncommonly aristocratic look since he last saw you … you reminded him of the young Neuhaus{76} … yes, of course he’s too young to remember him and we know you’re not an actor … but we’ll pay you the highest rate …
Tishka began tracing out his circles again. Foam bubbled from his mouth, leaving a damp mathematical curve. What was I to do now? The epileptic fits gave way to a sexual lunacy. He humped everything in succession: blankets, pillows, towels, chairs, briefcases, manuscripts, empty bottles, ashtrays, shoes, umbrellas, the guests themselves. Probably they had all arrived during the time I don’t remember. And those two with the psychocannon … What about it, maybe they were really doing it to me already, irradiating me experimentally, and they just kept right on increasing the dose, still marveling at my strength, but on poor
Tishka here the rays had immediately had a ruinous effect. No one had ever, so dramatically, gone crazy before my very eyes. And everyone gives advice! A nation of counselors, as Y. used to say, the friend who sent me the stereo, which Tishka immediately humped all over. The American professor—Murphy, I think his name was—he simply fled, abandoning the stereo … What, can’t you summon a veterinarian in this country? You can summon him, but … The elephant can eat a ton of fruit, but … And indeed, why is it our elephants aren’t dying yet? A rich country, no doubt about it … Tatarbekov—he said it was quite impossible to launch cats into the cosmos. They’re all psycho. Only dogs … “Only dogs,” said the cosmonaut Tatarbekov, sitting in my kitchen and smoothing the general’s stripes on his pant legs to fortify himself. He had been brought to see me, of course, by the Afghan major. We poured a fresh drink, and Tatarbekov went on with his story about the cognac cucumber. “Do you know what a cognac cucumber is? No, you don’t know what a cognac cucumber is!” The flask had been made out of foil, the main weight was its screw-in stopper. They hid the flask under an instrument panel when the rocket was being weighed—it proved to be one and a half kilos too heavy, but the flask was not discovered, and one experimental instrument had to be disassembled … so out in space, when he unscrewed the flask, it went blam! and out there, you know how it is, the weightlessness, and there was this one giant cognac-drop hanging in the air, just like a cucumber, they had to catch it right out of the air, drop by drop.
Then Tatarbekov vanished. Tishka disappeared right behind him.
The ambulance arrived at last. Tatarbekov was gone without a trace. When asked whether cats get epilepsy, they shrugged their shoulders and offered to put him to sleep. I wouldn’t, not on any account, but now Tishka himself had vanished. He had long been keeping watch by the doorway, trying to slip out at every opportunity. He wanted time to live a little, like a grown-up tomcat: sing a song, have a look … His precocious maturity proved the deadliness of his disease. I would catch him on the stair landing, in other people’s entrances and cellars. He stared at me with blank eyes that refused to recognize me, the eyes of a son who has gotten out of hand: he would not forgive me this. His unwillingness to come home was not mere madness, it was the desperation of resolve. At last he had disappeared for good.
Dear God, what kind of man was I, that not a single creature could get along with me! My whole life narrowed and focused and began to happen. She arrived on her own initiative—how had I dared not to tell her anything about Tishka!—we searched together. Zyablikov joined us. “I told you right off it was the cat plague,” Zyablikov said. “Was he dragging his feet?” She and Zyablikov developed a mutual understanding. I can always detect this, when her gestures become a trifle more fluid and her glance a fraction of a second more attentive. I followed them through the courtyards, annoyed that I was so doleful and muddleheaded: I could never be the first to recognize that we hadn’t been in this specific entrance, or that there was yet another cellar here.
When we warmed ourselves, she would make mulled wine. Zyablikov, he could drink anything at all, anything in a bottle. Once he drank a dose of insecticide sufficient to exterminate vermin over an area of half a hectare. “But why exactly half?” I asked indignantly. “In our country, private plots don’t come any bigger,” Zyablikov said, proving his case. And in truth, he never lied. For a man like Zyablikov, there’s no point in lying. I yielded to him. What did I have, apart from my aristocratic look? I understood her.
But it was I who found Tishka. Better I hadn’t! There would have been some meaning in it if he had disappeared without a trace, meeting the fate of a fighting tomcat and not that of an ill-starred Soviet animal. His tail and paws had been broken, and it was obvious at first sight that he wasn’t long for this world. He kept scratching me and trying to break away, however, desiring no improvements for himself. She saw him in my arms—then and there, I was to blame for his so calamitous condition. I held him as if holding my own guilt … Had Zyablikov held him, he would have been a hero for finding the cat. Had she found him, then she would have been the one: she had found him! Whereas I didn’t even know how to hold him in my arms.
But it was I who had to get the car started, I who had to drive it. Because I had the car and she had the cat. He lay on her bosom as if she were the Virgin Mary. My car hadn’t started for a month. It resembled its master, like a dog; the resemblance increases with age, people say. Its fenders were crumbling to dust, like butterfly wings. At someone’s urging I had stuffed up the holes with discarded nylon stockings to match. A panel of drivers, convened right on the street by Zyablikov, tinkered with my motor. Then we pushed it, the whole street. Then no one was there. Darkness had fallen before the car started, of itself, for no apparent reason. The main thing now was not to turn off the motor—and not to brake, because the brakes didn’t work either. “Look,” Zyablikov said, pointing to my rear license plate, “a bug!” This was the first time I had seen a bug, one of its varieties. Zyablikov knew all about it. “Your spook was helping start the car. I saw him.” It was a round gray gewgaw on a magnet, which had been stuck above the license plate. I removed it and turned it over. Where was the mike? “This is a transmitter, shit-ass!” Zyablikov said. I put it back in the same place, and we drove off.
All the veterinary hospitals had just closed. Searching more and more for one open round the clock, we crossed the capital from end to end. Dear God, what a city this was … Only true misfortune will take you through such back streets. The place we live in was revealed. Soggy courtyards and slimy basements. A last matron, wielding her mop in a lighted doorway: “You’re just a minute too late, folks, Doctor left just this minute. What have you got, a kitty?” Charitable despite all, this institution.
I was sure that Zyablikov had bugged me. Wrong again. In the very first courtyard, the police showed up right behind us. First, one walked past as if by chance, eying the car, but we were standing beside it and he didn’t come over. Then another; we had only to walk away. Again, Zyablikov was the first to catch on. He removed the bug and put it in his pocket. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said.
That was how we drove, taking off the bug when we stopped and putting it back when we moved. And every time, a patrolman appeared from under the sidewalk, as though for no reason: wasn’t watching us, even seemed to be whistling and looking at the sky. We debated. The story was this. They had noticed that we had noticed, and now their overriding mission was to destroy the secret evidence. This is more important than following you: who gives a shit about you?
So we bowled along. The stocking worked out of the hole in the fender and streamed like an embassy flag. “That’s for when the ambassador himself is in the car,” Zyablikov explained. “If he’s not, the chauffeur doesn’t have the right. An ambassador’s car is extraterritorial. When you’re inside it, you’re as good as in the embassy, on the territory of your own state.”
Our car was extraterritorial. The traffic police did not stop us but merely watched us pass and went off to a booth to make a phone call. It turned out we had an escort. “Look, look!” Zvablikov pointed out the rear window, and there was a black Volga—following openly, festooned with lights and antennas and all the extras.
That was how we drove Tishka, with a flag and an escort.
This entertained us and enabled us to survive. We were laughing hard. She did know cats after all: Tishka was asleep in her arms and no longer struggling. “It brings us together,” Zyablikov said.
It also parted us. We buried him by the Kazan Railroad embankment, and that was when we forgot to pocket the bug in time. It vanished. “They had to have it,” Zyablikov said angrily. “Why did you mess up! What a piece of evidence!”
She walked away without a word of farewell, without raising her eyes.
Zyablikov and I were left alone together. “Do you at least have something left to drink?” Zyablikov suddenly looked at me with attentive eyes from which the mockery had vanished. Sighing as if he had
reconciled himself to something, he followed me in, although I had nothing left. “Somehow I always get a fiendish appetite at a funeral. There’s a reason for the funeral repast.” He prowled around in search of cologne, mouthwash, quinine extract, any kind of elixir, toothpaste, even shoe polish—I had nothing, but he found, and started to make, some dried soup. I warned him that the packet was from the last resident, and it had been several years since I moved in. But Zyablikov was famed for his gastronomic fearlessness. “This is nothing. Once I ate the egg of a dragon. It was several million years old.” “The egg or the dragon?” I was touched by his attentiveness. “The egg, of course!” he said gleefully. “The dragon would have been another several years older. Well, a brontosaur. In Tajikistan. I was stoned out of my mind and horribly hungry. I set off to the market and bought a hundred eggs at once. Put them all on to boil and fell asleep. I woke up groggy, but my appetite was gone. And I had a hundred eggs, already hard-boiled. In a stupor I peeled them all and sculpted a single huge yolk. And on the surface—I thought for a minute and duly plastered it with the white. Put it on a big pilaf platter. What to do, I wondered. I phoned the local Academy of Sciences. Blah, blah, I said, found a whole brontosaur egg, have it at my house. The entire presidium came racing over in their skullcaps and robes, wearing their orders and medals on top. They sat down cross-legged around the platter and started thinking, arguing about Moscow. Finally they sent for vodka. But I laced it with dope. The venerable aksakalli got smashed. Again, fiendish appetite. And in their reverie they ate the whole egg. They woke up: where was the egg? They woke me. I don’t know, I said, I went right to sleep … and left the egg in your care. I don’t know what will happen now, I said. At the mention of Moscow, they were gone with the wind.”