The Monkey Link

by Andrei Bitov

  “You set the fire?!”

  “Suppose I did … ”

  “And YOU say this to me! Son-of-a-bitch Herostratus!{109} A lot of honor this will … It was sheer laziness! You just didn’t take the kettle off!”

  I made a dash to save the manuscript, but HE grabbed my arm. HE had always been stronger than I.

  I cowered and howled in pain.

  “Really, was the thing so very precious to you?” he asked, as if in surprise. “Wait a minute.”

  But I did not succeed in restraining him. I simply wasn’t strong enough.

  He vanished in the smoke and the fire.

  He was agile as a monkey. An instant later I spotted him on a third-floor balcony. Impossible to see clearly …

  But who else could it have been?

  The muzzle was aimed straight at my forehead, and somehow this reassured me. Because the muzzle was too large, or because we’re used to seeing it more often in the movies than in real life. Strange that a piece like that could also shoot, and not merely in order to intimidate. A submachine gun is somehow more dangerous, a pistol still worse, but nastiest of all is a knife …

  Yet they had knives and submachine guns, too, these soldiers who had abandoned their APCs to stretch their legs, smoke a cigarette under the clear sky, and lounge against the warm August armor, and their faces were also unfrightening with regard to the submachine gun and combat knife, which they didn’t even plan to use, which they were merely supposed to wear like badges and chevrons, but looking at them you could have no faith that they wouldn’t fire the cannon when the order came. The businesslike courtesy of their gestures and tone in contacts with civilians was such as to suggest that they had been briefed not to yield to provocation. They were executing this first order well, which meant they were also capable of firing the cannon. The public conversed freely with them, and from the car it appeared they were making some arrangement for this evening, after … I liked the soldiers. Unexcitable. They had nothing against the people whom they would be ordered to shoot.

  That was what I was thinking, I who knew nothing about this, as I turned into the embankment detour in order to get across to the other bank, and became stuck in a traffic jam. I studied each oncoming face at length, because there were some people who for some reason had the same urgent need to get across to this bank. And it was always the same face, not only because the traffic jam was moving so unthinkably slowly, dragging along like a low storm cloud, its color blending with the asphalt, and not only because the other bank, which I could see across the river, was just as clogged as this one, but because each successive oncoming driver maintained so much the same expression that it was truly amazing—what had shaken them so, united them so? … Their same, shared face said, I don’t know who you are, staring at me right now, but you didn’t see me and I didn’t see you, and how I feel about what’s happening, am I for that bunch or this bunch, you’ll never find out and never tell … Only their knuckles were white on the steering wheel, as if gripping it harder than usual. Their sullen impassivity, their universal upper-echelon secretiveness … that was what frightened me. Not one expression of annoyance, indignation, fear, despair—they had all known all of this by heart for so long! It was they who were soldiers … all to a man. Halt! Breathe exhaust fumes! But not a single expression of exultation, either, I thought with glad melancholy. Not one!

  When I had squeezed across the bridge at last and parked fairly near the cordon, I gently crept out to reconnoiter. Deserted and sunny. Neither cars nor people. Had they been chased away, or had they fled? The benevolence of the police put me on guard. I could see why there were no cars, but if there were no people, it turned out, it wasn’t because they weren’t being admitted. A few curious people, as wary as I, were pretending they had wandered over here with a non-political purpose. I felt neither terror nor gaiety. Nothing. A Bruegelesque idiot, in a winter cap with one earflap missing, was traversing this dismal canvas in a direction of his own choice, or at any rate crossing through it. He was carrying the heavy iron headboard of a bed, and I imagined I saw in his manner something surprisingly familiar, even kindred, even painfully so … Pavel Petrovich!

  “How are you?” he said.

  Meaning “how do you do,” nothing more.

  We took hold of the headboard together and started to carry it. He in front, I behind. He seemed to know where he was going with it … For some reason it was very nice to see the back of his head, his thinning hair. A little old man in worn-out Adidas …

  “Say, where’d you disappear to?” he said to me.

  “Who, me?!”

  “You haven’t gotten any younger,” he said with satisfaction.

  “Whereas you look splendid,” I parried.

  “All the same, I’m frightfully glad to see you, Doctor Doctorovich … Well, what about it, finish the novel?”

  Well, wasn’t he the scoundrel? As if it hadn’t been seven years. I almost dropped the bed.

  “Say, did you bring any with you?”

  He hadn’t even cared about my answer, it turned out …

  “Come on, don’t feel so bad … I brought it.”

  This was said with such kindness, suddenly, that I realized he knew all. And he did, in fact, know all …

  “The fire at the Abkhazia started in the stovepipe in the kebab restaurant. They never cleaned it—they kept the fire inspector supplied with kebabs. Lamb fat and soot are a very good fuel mixture. ”

  “How would you know?”

  “I was there.”

  Again I almost dropped the bed on my foot.

  “You recently saw City Lights?” I guessed.

  “What’s that, a Charlie Chaplin?”

  “Where are we going?” My voice sounded ungracious.

  “We’re eagerly awaited.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We threw our burden on a pile of scrap metal. It was the barricade.

  “It’s that easy?” I asked in delight.

  “What did you think?”

  And he glanced disdainfully at the tanks. We settled down cozily with a view of the tanks, as well as of the Moscow River and the Hotel Ukraine.

  “Are you a democrat?” I asked.

  “Who, me?” he said indignantly. “Of course. Who do you think I am?”

  He built a fire out of boxes, then and there, and produced from the pocket of his oversized smock … What all didn’t he have there! Before I could think, he was extracting “it.”

  He was extracting “it,” but I was looking at his hands. It was hard not to look at them. His characteristic fingernails, half typewriter keys, half claws, had curled down even farther, and his hands were covered with ghastly pink spots. Psoriasis, none other … “Vodka knows its job,” as he himself had once said.

  “A burn,” he said, noticing my glance.

  To tell the truth, I was dumbfounded.

  “I was repairing an iron ..

  And really, that burn couldn’t have been this fresh.

  “Now … ” he said vaguely. “Now,” he said, concentrating, and poured us each our first.

  We had time for seconds, too, while the chifir{110} was coming to a boil.

  “Found it!” Affectionately he scratched under his shirt, where his heart was, with his terrible hand. “Found it … ” And he glanced affectionately at the reality around us, as though it had changed into a small kitten. “You keep interrupting, I’ve never succeeded in fully expressing myself to you … The poor, poor thing! How it turns itself inside out with effort! For whose sake? And what can we offer it but never-ending, gasping work. … Four chambers. Always leading from one to another. Not a second’s sleep. And death in every pulse. Keeping count of death … keeping count of every second, a little more quickly than the moment passes. The heart—it’s faster than time! How short a distance left to run … It breaks the finish tape! A record! An ovation! And you’re gone. You didn’t run—you only thought you were running. Y
our heart ran! And your heart finished, not you. Why do you feel so sorry for yourself? Take pity on your heart, your heart!”

  And he poured again, for himself alone.

  “Wasn’t it you, Doctor, who used to quote to me from Thomas … ‘Until the outer becomes … ’ On your lips it all sounded strange. Like some sort of paradox: the outer becomes the inner, the man a woman, life death, and vice versa … Nothing strange about it! It’s merely a description of the heart … Merely! What a thing to say … How it struggles, your poor heart … Hear it struggling? It beats—and you hear. That’s the whole story. The music comes after. The rest is silence. A pause. The abyss. The cosmos. The heart doesn’t beat, it stops. Each second flies into the abyss, dies, faints there. And you also used to discourse on clocks! … The heart alone measures time in nature. Ever see the connecting rod on a locomotive? Think it turns the wheel? The usual technical sleight of hand! Because they have it hooked up to a feeble, shy little rod, in such a way that no one can notice that the connecting rod doesn’t move by itself. The little rod pulls it up, to make it move from the dead point—and the locomotive goes, fat and important, he puffs, pretends it’s him, thinks he’s the one. The heart—this is the main lock! It closes the whole chain: the universe with its holes, parsecs, and dwarfs, and the Earth of that Universe, and on it life, with its amoeba and man … and on man, this padlock! What is less artificial than the heart, with its ventricles, auricles, valves, and aortas? The whole of it was invented. By whom?! This is my blood, and this is my flesh … An eternal infarct! An eternally ruptured and healing membrane … The heart—this is virginity! Chastity! Because He blew Himself to bits for each one of us! Spare your heart, they say … but you can’t use God sparingly … simply pity it. It’s incorrigible, the heart!”

  I was suddenly ashamed of my travels abroad, my dacha, my car, my potatoes, and I expressed too hastily my agreement and delight, noting, however, that the blood is enriched in the lungs … How indignant he was!

  “Through the lungs, you say? … Through everything! What do you breathe? You assume you breathe air … But I say to you: Not in the lungs is the blood enriched, but in the heart. And with that enrichment it arrives here.” He rapped his forehead scornfully. “Our most public place, most polluted outhouse. Everyone’s noggin is like a thing. The head and the balls—these we have on the outside. But the heart is inside! It’s incarcerated in us as in a prison. That’s why we all have the same thoughts, and yet our hearts are lonely. Space vehicles, flying through the darkness of flesh … Our hearts are separated, but not our thoughts. A thought is a very superficial thing, and it never touches the essence. The brain doesn’t sing or dance, it doesn’t weep or rejoice, it’s a cold jellied mess. Why are we fixated on this bowl of mush? The brain is the very one who has never spared the heart, for he smugly imagines that the heart serves him. Everything, if you please, is subordinate to him—which means that everything also waits on him. And then, since everything waits on him, well, everything’s under his control. And then, since everything’s under his control, well, he can do everything. And since the brain can do everything, Come on, he says, let’s make an artificial heart! They built a ministry the size of the White House. Right Ventricle Department, Left Auricle Department. They hooked it up to a dying man: Go ahead, live! But I said: I don’t want to! The brain got angry at the man: Why not? we’ve provided you with everything, first-class supplies, what don’t you have enough of? missing your heart, you say? … They busied themselves with improvements, along the line of redistributing departmental functions and reducing staff. They made significant progress. The heart was quartered in a city block instead of a precinct. At this point a thoroughly wise man came and accused the doctors, not without justification, of stupidity. You’re archaics, he said. Why try to copy nature? You’ll never pull it off. Let’s proceed from purely technical parameters. To start with, they caught a calf. Installed a small electric motor in him … Do you know? He lived! The blood circulated normally. Supplied everything it was supposed to. And do you know what was missing? The stops! The blood brought supplies, but no notification of life and death. The calf had no pulse! His count of time was lost. He expired but didn’t die. For the heart’s every beat is … a battle! My God! What are you battling for? … Oh, Lord!” he exclaimed. “But how good it all is!”

  “What’s good?” I said in astonishment, catching sight of the tanks again.

  “The weather. The holiday. Despite all, it’s Transfiguration.”

  “ ‘The sixth of August, Old Style … ’{111} And I had forgotten!”

  “What, not patronizing the churches anymore?”

  “I didn’t patronize the churches!” I said, hurt.

  “I ran to church first thing today.”

  “You?”

  “I can get a hair-of-the-dog from the watchman. And what should I see but this bed.”

  “You’re eternal! You’re a phoenix! Thank God … And of course you know what’s going to happen?”

  “What’s going to happen? Not a frigging thing! There’ll be a thank God. A great holiday.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean them … ”

  “Which, those?” He didn’t even glance at the tanks. “Scrap metal. But don’t mind them. See there!”

  With the spoon he was using to stir the chifir, he pointed skyward, not looking.

  At first I imagined … But then I thought, No … I glanced down at the tanks once more, and then up at the sky. No, it couldn’t be! But …

  “And I saw in the air an army … ”{112}

  Leaning on white-hot spears as if on shovels, wearing quilted jackets over their white wings, the angels dozed in the sky. Their Russianized, Düreresque faces were spacious as fields, creased by lightning, and smoothed by the unquestioned inevitability of martial labor. Their swollen, blacksmiths’ fists, forged along with their weapons, inspired trust, like their faces. My heart was eased, not troubled: it was they whose fingernails had grown through their hands, they who were shackled to the clouds with ascetics’ chains, they who had the heavenly trash of Russian villages stuck to their wings, like chicken droppings masquerading as a patina—log cabins, fences, cart tracks, wells, the ruins of churches and tractors … The sleep of the angels was leaden, and light as their wings. They startled and snorted like horses; their breath made our campfire flicker a little, a puff of smoke would reach up to them, and then it would seem that the angels smelled of the fire of their tireless battle. O God, how forbearing Thou art toward us, and harsh toward them!

  “O Lord, help them!”

  … He thought or I said?

  (February 28, 1993, Forgiveness Sunday)

  FROM THE TRANSLATOR

  The Boundaries Within

  On April 8, 1944, Hero of the Soviet Union Lieutenant Lapshin and his rifle platoon, in a sudden attack from two sides, took the bridge in the zoo, killing 30 Nazis and capturing 195. This decided the outcome of the battle for the zoo.

  -—Inscription on a monument at the Kaliningrad Zoo

  Andrei Bitov wrote the three tales in this novel between 1971 and 1993, while the Soviet Union moved from peace to war to collapse. The first tale was published in 1976, but the second did not appear—and the third could never have been written—until after glasnost. As time flows through the novel, the changing fortunes of the author, the hero, the censor, and their country generate a very complex set of ironies.

  On the simplest level, The Monkey Link is a novel in three acts, a comedy of ideas. Bitov originally intended to pose three questions: What is man’s role in relation to other biological species? To God? To humankind? The story was to end in the early eighties—that is, before Mikhail Gorbachev, before glasnost and perestroika, in the so-called era of stagnation, when, as Bitov wrote in a synopsis in 1990, “time and the Empire itself were frozen like eternity, and the boldest mind could not have guessed the course of history.” But history overtook the novel. The events of 1991—the failed coup against Gorbachev, Bor
is Yeltsin’s sudden ascent to power, and the dissolution of the Soviet empire—forced another question: What is a man’s role in relation to himself?

  An empire inevitably shapes the mental landscape of its citizens. The pride of empire distorts their moral boundaries to include dominion over others, while tyranny and terror divide people against each other and against themselves, forcing them to betray friends, country, and conscience. For people of Bitov’s generation the problem is compounded by the trauma of a wartime childhood. His fictional heroes tend to suffer from a painful, multifaceted alienation: a sense that they do not know who they are, that they do not belong in their own time and place, that they are distant from “the people” and from life itself, that they live only in books or movies. Like some of Dostoevsky’s heroes, or Thomas Mann’s, they cannot be sure which of their self-contradictory identities is real, where their deepest loyalties lie, or whether they serve God or the devil.

  Hidden at the center of the hero’s problems in The Monkey Link is the image of the Bronze Horseman, Peter the Great (1672—1725). Bitov was born in Peter’s capital, and his writings are steeped in the Petersburg literary heritage. Nevertheless. his heroes have expressed a profound ambivalence toward the brilliant tyrant who designed the city and shaped the destiny of the empire. In A Captive of the Caucasus (1983). Bitov’s book about his spiritual quests in Armenia and Georgia, he formulates the problem of imperial pride and envy very simply: “This journey begins from afar … From Peter the Great—half benefactor, half Antichrist.” The Antichrist of contemporary Russian history, of course, was Stalin, and an identification of the two men was the artistic premise underlying Bitov’s use of imagery from Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” in his first novel, Pushkin House (1971).

  In The Monkey Link, another figure lurks behind these two. Not mentioned, but implicit in the structure of the book, is the three-faced Lucifer of the Divine Comedy, who stands waist-deep in the frozen lake of hell and gnaws on the three worst traitors of all time (Judas Iscariot, Cassius, and Brutus). Bitov’s personal map of the twentieth century might be described as a three-dimensional design with its horizontal surface covered by a thick layer of Soviet ice. Wherever the hero finds himself in space and time, a vertical axis runs up to heaven and down to hell: his life journey traces spirals around it. He exists at that spiritual center, waist-deep in the ice like Dante’s Lucifer, and his ego relentlessly punishes him for his various betrayals (of God, of Caesar, of self). He must acknowledge the part of him hidden in the ice, recognize and forgive his own capacity for betrayal, understand that Stalin is within him—he must, like Dante the Pilgrim, climb down past Lucifer’s hairy loins before his soul can complete another spiral upward through time.