by Andrei Bitov
This story failed to cheer me. “ ‘How sad our Russia is’{77}—did Pushkin say this, do you think, or did Gogol invent it?” “Who the fuck knows!” Zyablikov said angrily. “I can’t call up the dead. But I can arrange a rendezvous with someone living. Anyone you want.” I didn’t understand what he meant. But what he meant was his exceptional aptitude as a psychic, which had revealed itself as suddenly as, in their time, his affiliation with Buddhism or Orthodoxy. And he meant that I could rendezvous not only with someone within our borders but also with someone unreachable, like a woman friend of mine overseas whom I passionately wanted to see just then, when my loneliness was becoming qualitatively total. Zyablikov, of course, was an insightful person, though he had also been sufficiently initiated into my life story. I don’t know which was greater here, my disbelief that he could effect such a rendezvous or my disinclination to see anyone. Once he had forcibly treated me for headache. I have a virtue: my head never aches (like a Georgian, all I have there is a bone). He twisted my head so hard that for twenty-four hours I couldn’t get rid of a very acute migraine. I submitted to this and felt better than I ever had.
“Well,” he said peremptorily, sitting me down on the shabby leather couch and sitting himself down on my right. “Where is she?” “I don’t know.” This complicated the task. He took my right hand and felt my pulse. “Close your eyes.” I did. “Think!” I couldn’t think. “What do you see?” I saw nothing. I didn’t want to lie to him.
This was a strange mixture—my utter disbelief in ESP and my desire to be totally honest in the experiment … “Come on!” he said, angrily squeezing my pulse. “Don’t resist!” Except for an upright piano (as shabby as the couch), which stood opposite me and which I stared at in surprise before closing my eyes, I saw nothing. The piano lingered under my eyelids as though I hadn’t closed them. The nuance of black reminded me of water. The water in the Fontanka River,{78} which the windows of my grade school had faced. I had stared out the window at that water, not listening to the drone of the teacher, just as I was now staring at the piano and not hearing Zyablikov … I was staring at the water through the classroom window and thinking that this was a Venetian window—meaning the shape of the pane. “Where are you?” came Zyablikov’s voice, from far away. I grinned. “In Venice.” “Do you know the address?” “No, how could I?” “Then ask!” “Whom?” “Anyone.” “There are a lot of them.” “The first one you meet!” He was squeezing my pulse with impatience. “Go on, what’s the matter with you!” “It’s awkward somehow … And besides, I don’t know the language.” “Ask in Russian!” he commanded. “It doesn’t work.” I felt guilty. “Board a gondola!” “But what will I tell him?” “Let him take you where he wants, it doesn’t matter … Well?” came his impatient call. “What’s up?” “We’re underway … ” “Tell him to dock.” The boat bumped against three steps that were splashing in the water. The school was opposite. I stepped ashore by a dilapidated palazzo. “Enter!” I heard, as though from the boat. “It’s strange, there’s no entrance here … ” “Enter from the courtyard! Go on … Is there an entrance?” “Yes … ” My voice reached me from elsewhere, faint in the distance. “Enter!” “But there’s only a staircase here, and a small door … ” “Open the door!” “But there are only some brooms, dustpans … ” “Dustpans … ” Unconcealed scorn resounded in my ear. “Pah! Go on up!” “There are two doors here … I don’t know which … ” “Push either one! Well? Do you see her?” It was a rather dim and untidy room with the look of a bachelor’s quarters, somewhat empty; an office desk and chair stood by the slanting window. Nobody home. “Nobody home. It’s the wrong apartment … ” “But there’s another room! Go into the next room … Well?” Someone scuttled away from me. In the half-light I didn’t immediately recognize his face. “My brother’s here,” I said. “He’s frightened.” “That’s normal,” came the satisfied voice. “Subtle bodies always take fright. Ask if maybe he has something to drink … ” My brother, in confusion, spread up the unmade bed, on which he apparently slept without undressing, and gladly fetched a bottle from the refrigerator. He closed the door quickly. I had time to notice that the refrigerator was otherwise empty. “Well, does he have anything?” “Yes, whiskey.” “How much?” “A little less than half a bottle.” “Good enough. Hurry up and pour!” My brother bustled around and brought two glasses, hastily and poorly washed. Frightened as he had been by my sudden appearance, he was glad of this temporary remedy for the situation. He poured hurriedly, his hand shaking. “Cheers!” he said—this was the first word he had spoken—and greedily drained his glass. “Well,” I heard from the other shore, “have you drained your glass?” I was still twirling the glass in my hand, in a reverie. “He has, but I haven’t,” I reported. “Well, what are you doing!? Hurry up! Chug … chug … chug!” It echoed as though he had cupped his hands like a megaphone and shouted across a river. I made up my mind at last. “I chugged it,” I said. “You’re hi-i-igh”—the loud whisper sounded right in my ear, and a handcuff seemed to have been removed from my arm. “Now talk to him about anything you want … I’m not listening.” I was at a loss; I didn’t know how to ask him or what about. For some reason I felt unbearably sorry for him. Irretrievability—that was the word. Like a doomed man … When it’s not subject to appeal. When you also concur with the sentence. He was in his right mind, as never before. And this was a misfortune. Actually, we had nothing to talk about: everything was clear. “Why did you dream all this up?”{79} I asked, to ask something. “They promised to cure me, and I stayed”—that was all he answered, and suddenly he smiled Father’s weak and gentle smile. The black waves of the piano floated before my eyes again. I disembarked where I had been sitting, opposite the piano … Next to me Zyablikov was asleep, blissfully collapsed. I wanted to ask him why my brother, and about the nature of this strange degeneration of my overseas girlfriend from a woman into a man. Zyablikov could not be roused. Solicitously I lifted his feet onto the couch and covered him with a lap robe. The lap robe, for some reason, was my father’s, the one he used to throw over his chilly shoulders before his death.
All of this was from somewhere else. The lap robe, the piano, the couch{80} … How did I come to have a piano? The piano was from Zyablikov’s apartment, which I hadn’t yet visited then. So, this wasn’t then. This happened later. But was the lap robe even longer ago than this? …
I forgot the cat immediately, forever. He didn’t fit in either the past or the future. No one had noticed: at first he was simply alive, then he was more alive than dead, then more dead than alive, then simply dead … No one had noticed. The good thing about powerful emotions is that you tire of them. After this I could not live alone.
Lord, how good to have hope! Since when have we given the name hope to despair? “That’s life,” as a certain fond wife said, standing in an accessible pose, when she learned that her husband’s father had died.
I unloaded the stereo that my overseas friend Y. had given me. Distributed the money to my wives. And was already en route, aboard the plane, reading the script in which I had consented to play, not the lead role, but a central one. Hollywood is everywhere.
2. The Monkey Link
Hollywood is everywhere … Three hours later I was eating lamb’s-fry kebabs and washing them down with Czech beer on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Night. Wind. The night was warm, but the wind was strong. It shook the wretched board kebab shack, giving it an extra coziness. When the season ends, the filmmaking begins: we were alone on the shore. Outside was desert, inside we had everything. Having arrived before dawn, I still didn’t know how true this would prove in daylight.
I went out to look at the sea, on the pretext of the beer I had drunk. No sea. A yawning black hole, which reeked of darkness and slime. As though the sea had been locked up at the end of the season, like a vendor’s shack. Or even as though it had been stolen.
Perhaps this was some local (Oriental? Muslim?) peculiarity, to have everything a
t home and nothing outdoors. The chef and the waiter were playing backgammon, paying no attention to either the color television (which was on) or us or the stove. They even had a timer! No wonder they also had Czech beer. And it was as though we were the hosts: benevolent film people, deceiving ourselves with art, not too drunk, just enough, since we would be shooting tomorrow.
A diaphanous green insect, the sea’s sole representative here, crawled across the beer mug onto my hand and fixed its clever blue eyes on me. I could not withstand its gaze and closed my eyes, trying to hear the surf through the whistle of the wind. This was important to me now, as a musician … Leaves. For some reason the shore was strewn with fallen leaves. Strange. I had never seen a sea like that. As if in a dream … It was a dream.
I looked like Neuhaus and taught piano. My pupil, a Kazakh by nationality, looked like the young Pasternak. I left my wife and married a housemaid, by whom I had a child. I was supposed to lead the baby, barefoot, across the piano, so that he would leave his touching footprints on the dusty lid. (Had something happened to me fairly recently, a lifetime ago, involving a piano?) Outside the window, meanwhile, there was supposed to be a thunderstorm: thunder, lightning, torrents down the windowpanes. My school friend came, an artist who had lost an arm in the war and who all his life had been hopelessly in love with the wife I had left—he came to reproach me for abandoning my wife. We reached no accord, and after insulting me he slammed the door so hard that the glass flew out and smashed to smithereens on the floor. Then my new wife, the former housemaid, arrived soaking wet in the downpour, her thin dress outlined her figure, and much became understandable. “That’s life,” she said. I suggested this phrase, and it was promptly inserted.
Director Sersov spent half the night expounding his plans to me. They were extensive. I was supposed to write a script for him. It was to be based on an incident that had actually happened. A group of young astrophysicists go on a fishing trip in the mountains on the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. A snake crawls across the road. They try to drive around it. They look back—no snake. Where has it gone? They drive on. The fishing trip is a success.
But when they pack up their catch, they discover that the snake has gotten into their car. They try to chase it out, but it crawls up inside, someplace where they can’t get at it. Can you imagine?! Desert. Heat. The bite of the Blunt-nosed Viper is fatal .. , The fish are spoiling, characters are being revealed … Now, suddenly, a caravan. With the caravan, a Sufi. He knows how to converse with snakes. They ask the Sufi to persuade the snake to crawl out. The Sufi prays for a long time, and the snake finally consents. The infuriated astrophysicists start trying to kill it. The Sufi implores them not to do this, but they do. The Sufi is in despair, for the snakes will now cease to believe him. The Sufi curses them, prophesies their death. They send him on, return home, and get drunk.
I liked the word “Sufi,” but I didn’t like the ending. Yes, having them get drunk is good. But it’s only the beginning. They perish one by one, under very mysterious circumstances … “Who would allow such a thing?” the director said, sincerely offended, and I settled for the role of pianist.
In the morning I didn’t like the landscape. Not a drop of color in its face, not a blade of grass. Man had been here! Riddled with holes, black with grief, exhausted and abandoned—all the way to the horizon the earth was peopled only by black, rusted-out oil pumps. But even they were dead. Their beaks no longer pecked, because there was nothing to peck. And this was the site of the music school in which I taught pianoforte, if you please, to Kazakh children … And now I caught sight of an implausibly beautiful pomegranate, peeping out from behind a fortresslike clay duval. Within was paradise: roses, houris, and lamb’s fry with Czech beer … And now I stepped ankle-deep in a puddle of oil.
… The baby refused to come to my arms. Perhaps I smelled of oil. It’s that kind of smell … like blood … you begin to be bothered by it yourself. The baby set up a bloodcurdling howl and would not leave his footprints on the piano; the Azerbaijani firemen ran out of the water that poured down the windowpane. The baby was cut from the script altogether, his mother having been paid for a day’s work. The result was worse for my image: now I married the housemaid just because of the dress clinging to her figure. My wife had been the former Natasha Rostova, but my new wife was the former sweetheart of the young Sergei Esenin. What a lady-killer I was! While the Azerbaijani firemen were eating, and then refilling the tank with water, it was decided to do the scenes in reverse order: first the wet wife. She was doused from a bucket that had been specially warmed on the gas. I was supposed to whisper something in her ear, and she was supposed to cry. I saw my new wife for the first time, and I didn’t like her. Everything went well, but the director’s viewfinder, with the distinct inscription “Nikon,” had been forgotten on the piano lid, which was in the frame. This ruined the verité of harsh wartime. But the warm water had been used up, and the actress began to freeze. Vodka was obtained from the first-aid kit, and the actress recovered. I put my arms around her, and what did I see over her shoulder?{81} … A fresh bucket heating up, an Azerbaijani fireman courting a pretty assistant, people eating fried eggs, mending snags in panty hose, playing cards, knitting a sweater, selling, buying, bartering, changing their clothes, trying on new clothes and old clothes, stealing, drinking, drawing, fashioning spoon bait, reeling in their fishing lines—the cameras were rolling. Retake.
My wife stank of vodka, I of kerosene. “How’d you get so sozzled?” I whispered tenderly in her ear, and where she was supposed to burst out crying she burst out laughing. I was beginning to like her. Retake.
And every time, only the first take was any good.
My artist friend slammed the door, the glass shattered, and I, in confusion, not knowing what to do with it all, began to collect the splinters—but then abandoned the whole business. The assistants had done an excellent job: the glass had flown out as it was supposed to, had shattered into the requisite quantity of splinters in the designated spot, I had walked past as I was supposed to, had picked up a splinter as I was supposed to—but at that point I began to examine with curiosity the blob of plasticine adhering to it, for this was what they had used to hold the glass so that it could fly out, and I hadn’t even known that the plasticine was … Retake.
The second pane fell out before he had time to slam the door, and it gave him a cut on his only arm. First aid for the wounded … Retake.
The third pane was the last one. No more had been provided for. And it was thick. My friend had orders to slam the door as hard as ever he could, so that the glass would really fly out, really smash into a thousand pieces. My friend slammed as he was supposed to, the glass flew out as it was supposed to … I had never seen such a thing, and neither had anyone else. This was a large, rectangular pane of glass; somehow it fell upright, and without shattering at all it came rolling at me, waddling awkwardly, counting off its right angles with a clatter, completing turn after turn, one, two, and only on the third turn, after stopping to think, did it slowly topple sideways—again, without shattering. I stood open-mouthed and watched this miracle.
Some things have an idea behind them, and some things just are. It’s a rare piece of luck when there’s no meaning. And only in the movies is there such good fortune.
Something had happened yet again. I could stand no more.
Impoverishment of place. As though this whole solid, tangible, chosen world were really only a figment of the imagination. It had flown away just as lightly as a balloon. Atmosphere.
The atmosphere of description is somehow thicker and coarser than reality. Reality does not survive being described. Either it perishes or it gains full independence. Or did it ever exist at all? At any rate, whatever you have described, your only satisfaction will be that the text is finished. There will no longer be anything to compare it with. The past has disappeared somewhere, and the very space is gone.
And who created, re-created, incarnated, anticipated w
hom—the horse the chicken, or the cart the egg—will prove conclusively unclear, as a kind of ultimate conservation measure: so that nothing will infringe on anything, if only in the past. Who came first, did Dostoevsky create his Demons, or the demons us?{82} Did Dahl indeed create a Dictionary of the Living Language,{83} or had the language itself, by that moment, died? Had Russian literature finished, described all, or did the Revolution happen because all had been described, finished? Rather than guess, let us be in no hurry to settle any scores we may have with reality.
In the end, Columbus did discover India, not America.
Geography is like a wife. Travel is our polygamy. If we had a harem, we could stay in one place.
And so, all the places where I had loved to shut myself up and write a few pages died the same death: one day they entered a text. No matter how many vows I made to myself, on the principle “Don’t live where you fuck, don’t fuck where you live … ” Where are Toksovo, Peredelkino, Dilijan, Tiflis, Goluzino, Tamysh? At all events, they have been described. Perhaps they do exist. But I have died for them.