The Tool & the Butterflies

by Dmitry Lipskerov

  “Even your primary school students know about that, don’t they?”

  “But do they know about the debate on whether or not man should have come into this world?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well there you have it. The debate—or discussion, in this case—continued for a long while, but for the first time, both schools arrived at the same opinion. Man should not have come into this world! But since he has, he must put himself right!”

  Estin’s next letter arrived in November. It was delivered by a woman who looked to be a secretary and declined to have a hot chocolate. She was somewhat haughty and apparently upset that she was being used as a messenger. That wasn’t quite so, however: the chess master used Bella for a variety of purposes. Sometimes she would agree to some quick sex, but she mostly answered his calls, harshly repelling the superfluous ones.

  “What’s wrong with Schwartz?” Joseph asked.

  “Pneumonia,” Bella replied.

  “Tell him I say hello! He got sick in Germany …”

  “He’ll get better in Germany, too.”

  “What will the price of gold be in the medium term?” came the first question. “What geopolitical conflicts or changes in government will the world face? Devaluation of the dollar? Gold?” On and on it went. Joseph answered with a laconic “I don’t know.” The second batch of questions pertained to the chess master’s personal life. He requested that Joseph look into his prospects with the messenger, Bella Pushkina, and provide an answer to the question of whether or not they would make a good match. Joseph looked up at the woman with a gaze worthy of Lenin. The young man replied that she was indeed suitable for him … There followed a postscript, in which Estin wrote that he had tried to track Joseph down at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology but had been told that the student in question was not attending classes, even though he had received an automatic acceptance due to his stellar high school transcript. He hadn’t even filed the paperwork to drop out … What happened to studying quantum mechanics? Joseph replied that he was studying somewhere else and that Estin shouldn’t worry; he was doing fine and he would continue to answer the questions to the best of his ability.

  Once the messenger had received the envelope, she took it to her car and broke the seal, since she had already familiarized herself with the questions beforehand. The fact that her fate might soon be decided in the best possible way briefly turned the professional-minded individual into a regular, happy woman, humming the “Hymn of the Democratic Youth” all the way home.

  … A few years went by, but nothing about Joseph’s life changed. He visited the yeshiva, began to grasp the meanings of the book, and answered Estin’s meaningless questions.

  He attended the bat mitzvah of Antipatros the barber’s daughter, Zoika, who was no longer a funny little girl but a young woman, accepting all the responsibilities of adulthood. She had hair like Angela Davis, a great big ball that looked to him like a black dandelion. Her father had shaved the letter “V” into it. The girl looked fixedly at Joseph, and the light from the magical turquoise of her eyes filled up his heart like a warm and tender current.

  “A sun with blue rays,” he thought. “Truly, I behold an unearthly miracle!”

  … I would sometimes meet Joseph in person. I would just sit next to him on a bench on Tverskoy Boulevard and sit in silence as he devoured his latest book. I couldn’t understand why the young man spent his time on that chess master, Estin, trading the significant for the valueless, but I just couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him.

  One cold winter, I encountered Joseph sitting on a ledge near the entrance to Moscow’s underground transportation system. He was engaged in his typical activity, turning the pages of an ancient tome, immersed in the text like the moon in the ocean. I heaved myself up on to the cold granite beside him, holding an ice cream I’d bought from the frost-covered kiosk. It used to cost forty-eight kopeks … not anymore! I ate noisily—one of my shortcomings, I shall not deny it!—and Joseph favored me with a brief glance.

  “Bonjour!” I said and smiled in greeting at the spitting image of Iratov.

  “Good afternoon,” the reading youth said, smiling briefly in reply.

  “Do you find my noisy eating funny? I have an overbite. It used to be lot worse, though!”

  “Certainly not! I’m smiling because I’m reading about you.”

  “How?” I asked, so startled I dribbled ice cream on my lap. “Do you have the book of fates?”

  “I was speaking metaphorically, of course … It’s just that the entity described here bears a striking resemblance to you.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t know me at all!”

  “You are quite right, we have not met, but you do often sit next to me on the bench on Tverskoy Boulevard.”

  “So this resemblance is purely external,” I reasoned.

  “I think so.” Joseph tore himself away from the book and looked at me attentively as I finished my ice cream, thoroughly slopping my pants with it. I have never known the sensation of embarrassment, so I met my interlocutor’s gaze calmly. “You are the one who gave my mother money for my father.”

  “Is that written in the book?”

  “No, it came to me just now …”

  “Your mother told you?”

  “No …” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “The event came to me, but not in a dream … in waking.”

  “My appearance is rather unusual. Many people take me for some old acquaintance of theirs. By the way, have you ever been to Prague?”

  “No … what’s in Prague?”

  “Nothing, really, I’m just asking. I’ve never been there before, but I will certainly go.”

  “Well, I’ll look in my reference books!” Joseph promised.

  “Until next time!”

  “Until next time …”

  Then Joseph’s mother died. She was sick for just three days, and, in the waning hours of that Friday, she passed away, even though Joseph did everything he could to save her. If he could save anyone, let it be his mother; he thought he had the inner strength to make her life long and tranquil.

  On the first day of her illness, she told her son that she would be dead by Saturday. He stroked her round face and said that nobody could be granted such knowledge, that she had a perfectly ordinary cold … She was as bright as the moon, but she was extinguished quickly, and she asked her son not to grieve for her, since she would go to deer heaven, and all her relatives would be there. Joseph’s grandfather, the Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, would be there, and she was eager to see him …

  “Bury me beside your father,” she requested.

  Standing over the grave of Yevdokia Brodsky, his mother, Joseph felt for the first time in his waking life that someone else wielded some unlimited power over the world, which he could not break or understand. He was not afraid of death, but Dasha passing away so soon made him a vulnerable child once again, left alone in the great big world, and the one who ruled over it had still not extended his hand to him …

  A year later, I met Joseph in the Eliseevsky Store. He didn’t buy anything, just sat on the radiator and read, as was his custom.

  “I haven’t seen you for some time!” I said, approaching him. “Have you moved?”

  “No,” the young man answered. “My mother died.”

  “Oh yes, I heard … Mourning …”

  Joseph’s eyes were like oceans full of sorrow; I tried to buck him up by saying that the one who ran everything, the big building superintendent upstairs, had already extended his hand, but Joseph just hadn’t noticed.

  “Why haven’t I noticed? Do you know the answer?”

  “You lack focus. You are an information desk for that idiot Estin. Your gi-i-i-f-t! You’re scattering your gift to the wind.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the one who has scattered himself worst of all. And I am an acquaintance of yours …”

  In his next letter, Estin asked
if Joseph was willing to continue answering his questions. The young man replied that he had fulfilled all of his obligations to Estin, that his answers had tripled the chess master’s fortune, and that there was no further need for him.

  “I now consider myself at liberty,” he wrote, “inasmuch as I no longer require the apartment in which my mother and I lived. I spend most of my time outside of Moscow. Reclaim the apartment if you wish. You may act however you deem just …”

  Estin must be given his due. He may have been desperately angry, but it was his spouse, Bella, who did not wish to let this suddenly cocky “prophet” go.

  “What made him so cocky?!” she shouted … In the name of fairness, it must be noted that Estin, despite himself, released Joseph to the four corners of the earth and let him keep the apartment … It was due to that action that the chess master would live a rather long life in material comfort, without any great personal tragedy.

  Joseph almost completely moved into the yeshiva, signing the apartment over to the Jewish community. On the day he’d set aside for the paperwork, he hung around Bannyy Lane all morning, signed the deed of gift, then went to the barbershop. After a routine haircut, Antipatros permitted the young man to enter his private room above the shop, where he seemed perfectly comfortable leaving him alone with his adopted daughter, Zoika. Without saying a single word, they conversed with smiles alone. Her thin fingers lay in his strong palm, and the two young people felt that they had become a single whole. Their emotions, their shared origins, melded them into a single sunray. Their breathing nearly froze, and, for a few brief moments, they were suddenly outside their bodies, as if they had stepped out the door of a house and now they stood there, stunned, watching themselves from the sidelines. They liked this picture … This uncommon state the two young people found themselves in, and their divine ichor, were detected by the aquiline nose of the old Greek Antipatros, startling him so much that he sliced off my neighbor Ivanov’s earlobe—the one who had once burned down Tamarka’s corner store and thereby become a wealthy merchant. Ivanov shrieked, but Antipatros spat on the rejected flesh and stuck it back on. The earlobe instantly reattached itself, as tight as death, but the customer continued to whimper and demand compensation.

  “Have you completely forgotten who you are, you bastard?!” Antipatros hissed into the newly restored ear with the rage of a primitive pangolin. “You’ve only been here for a hundred years longer than me, but you’ve already assimilated, you scumbag.”

  Ivanov the merchant did not understand why Antipatros was treating him like that. He asked if he could get out of the chair, and the Greek lashed him across the cheeks with a hand turned wooden by age, like he did after he gave him a shave and a hot towel treatment.

  “Remember, you son of a bitch! You ruined the purest day of my life!”

  Finally, he awarded Ivanov a thump on the back of his flat head and sent him into the street with a kick. The door slammed, and Antipatros sat in the chair designated for his customers to enjoy the sensations coming from the merging of kindred souls. The manicurist, who was coming back from her lunch break, would’ve been frightened that the old man’s heart had given out, but the Greek gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Can we decide who is a sinner and who is not?” Joseph once asked his teacher.

  “Of course.”

  “Who endowed us with that right?”

  “No one. The answer to that question is very simple. Everyone is a sinner! We must start from that assumption.”

  “But there are also great sinners, those who commit crimes or bloody deeds.”

  “There are indeed,” the rabbi agreed.

  “But even those monstrous creations have all done something good at some point in their lives: loved their children, fed the birds, supported someone financially … Shall their good deeds not be weighed in the balance when they are judged? And what is to be done with righteous people, pure and enlightened people, who have also made some poor decisions in their lives, perhaps even accidentally?” Rabbi Yitskhok let Joseph finish before replying.

  “The good deeds of great sinners will also be weighed in the balance, as will the mistakes of righteous men. It is simply that those who have sinned gravely are rewarded for their kindness here, on earth, in this virtual world defined by time. They are rewarded with money, long lives, and other earthly pleasures, while righteous men are punished for their mistakes, here, on earth, punished with poverty, illness, and so on. In his eternal existence, the sinner goes to hell, while the righteous man, who has paid for his mistakes in our world, sits at the table with the Almighty and has everything he might wish at his disposal for eternity—in a spiritual sense, of course.”

  “I have read that hell is shame, that when a human soul goes to hell, it experiences monstrous shame. It is visited by the souls to whom that person did ill. That must be why people say someone is ‘burning with shame.’ What do you think, Rabbi?”

  “Everyone, even the most sinful, goes to heaven eventually. Twelve months in hell, then on to heaven. Every day in hell, however, will be equal to all the suffering Job endured in his entire life. Those who realize this, who understand that time does not exist there, or hardly exists, that a year in that place is equal to a thousand years on Earth, those are the truly God-fearing men … Yes, it may indeed be said that hell is shame and heaven is enjoyment. There is so much mixed up in people that oftentimes there is no knowing if one is a good person or scum, or what comes from where, or how to judge, how to create the scales for it …”

  A rabbi from the USA once came to the yeshiva, talked to Joseph briefly, and then withdrew into a conversation with Rabbi Yitskhok, which occupied the wise and knowing men for half an hour. Next came lunch; the American rabbi ate well, drank wine, and laughed a great deal. When he’d had his fill, he grabbed Joseph’s hand and pulled him into a dance, singing the tune himself, and so intoxicatingly that the kids in the kippahs began dancing along with them, but Rabbi Yitskhok kept sitting, stupefied, just mimicking the dance with his hands. When he’d had his fill of dancing, the American whispered in his partner’s ear that the latter would soon marry and snow would fall on his kippah, then unexpectedly said his goodbyes to everyone and set off for Moscow.

  “Do you know who that was?” Rabbi Yitskhok asked Joseph when the kids had been sent to bed and they were alone.

  “Rabbi Cohen.”

  “And do you know who Rabbi Cohen is?”

  “Do I need to know any more than that?”

  “Not necessarily. You in particular don’t need to know. But he came to Russia for one day, just to see you!”

  “Me?”

  “Precisely. He said that you have a vocation.”

  “What is it?”

  “He did not share that information … One does not talk about that.”

  “Everyone has a vocation!”

  “But in your case, he knows what it is! But you have still not been circumcised!”

  “Well … I honestly don’t know how to tell you …”

  “Are you having doubts?”

  “No … Of course not … I was just born … born circumcised. Without a foreskin, I mean. My mom said that doctors have found cases like that, and, well, my father was one. He died when I was very young, but I apparently inherited it. I’m Jewish on my birth certificate …”

  Rabbi Yitskhok was awake all night, thinking that the one everyone was waiting for might be right here. For minutes at a time, he even wept with joy, but by morning a critical thought overcame his euphoria, a harsh reminder that there was no need to put the cart before the horse, and that looking at the face of the one holding the reins was extremely dangerous …

  I accompanied Rabbi Cohen to the airport, following his car in a taxi, to make sure nothing happened. I waved to him when he met his coreligionists getting off a bus, a group of people with payots and fur hats. Somewhere in that interval, I encountered my neighbor Ivanov, well-dressed and sitting sadly on a bench near the entrance to the apartm
ent building.

  “Did Tamarka die in the fire?” I asked.

  “Boy, the way it went up …”

  “What about Zinka?”

  “Zinka inherited a warehouse full of goods and a location for a new store.”

  “Looks like you’re moving up in the world!” I said, looking my neighbor Ivanov up and down. “Brand-new jeans, a pullover, and a haircut!”

  “This prick almost chopped my ear off while he was cutting my hair. Some fucking barber he is! I’ll burn his shack to the ground!”

  “You’re a regular Nero!”

  “Who?”

  “He was this emperor who liked starting fires … Are you drinking?”

  “Yeah,” my neighbor admitted, but he suddenly snapped to seeing himself not as the lowlife alcoholic he had once been but as a person of means, someone with power in the world, but with the weakness of a Russian man. “Hey, have you been tailing me or what?” this inebriated Rothschild asked with the crudity of Ham.

  “Me? No …”

  “My brother?” Ivanov asked. “My parole officer?”

  “Did you buy new briefs?”

  “Huh?”

  “Briefs. Undergarments.”

  “No … Why waste money on something nobody’s gonna see? You’re weird, neighbor, and you ask weird questions!”

  “Sometime you’re gonna have to bang some fancy broad, but you haven’t washed your undies in seven years! How ’bout that?”

  Ivanov thought for a moment, then admitted that there was some truth to my words. Broads were going to be putting out now that he had money. Well, we live and we learn!

  Then I called and called …

  14

  Earth called the international space station. The stream was transmitted all over the world. The NASA administrator, a close-cropped career man who had earned his high rank, asked the astronaut if the crew was following what was happening on Earth.