The Monkey Link (13 page)

“Oh, no! You’re right.”

“Overproduction is a condition of genius. Who needs Dickens’s thirtieth volume? Or Tolstoy’s ninetieth? What, hadn’t they expressed themselves in their twelfth? Wouldn’t that have been enough for us?”

“You’re exaggerating, I think?”

“Yes. But I’m not a plumber. I don’t want to say the right thing, I want to tell the truth. Is
Don Quixote
enough for you out of all Cervantes?
Hamlet
, out of all Shakespeare?
 
…
Now, you’re a professional. How many books have you really read?”

“But how many paintings have you failed to see? In the Louvre, in the Prado, in our storage vaults?”

“In our age there are books, traveling exhibitions
 
…
We have it easier, seemingly. Although paintings aren’t illustrations, to be looked at. You have to
see
them.”

“You have to
read
a book, too.”

“That’s what I’m asking. How many books have you
read
?”

“Well, I haven’t read
Don Quixote
 
…
 
”

“And
Hamlet
?”

“That I’ve read. Recently.”

“How old were you?”

“Forty.”

“Thank you. And the Bible?”

“Why are you interrogating me?!”

“Don’t be angry. I was even older before I got van Dyck and van Eyck straight. Learned who van Eyck was. Can you imagine?”

“The Elder or the Younger?” This was insolence.

“As if you knew!” he scowled. “You, too, know just the one and have heard of the other. And I’m not asking you what van Eyck painted! So that you won’t get tangled up in Annunciations
 
…
I thought you were a person I could talk to.”

His feelings were gravely hurt. He was disillusioned.

“All right,” I conceded. “Twenty-seven. I first read the Gospel at twenty-seven. And just Matthew, at that. I never did read the Old Testament, except for Psalms and Ecclesiastes. But I’ve kept it with me ever since.”

“You open and close it?”

“I open and close it.” I definitely liked him.

“Are you a Christian?”

I pondered my answer.

“Half, then?”

“Well, except
 
…
 
” I stammered. “About half.”

“But you’re not drinking? Don’t, then, I won’t be offended
 
…
Is Mozart a genius?” he asked, after partaking.

“Now
there’s
a genius.”

“Everything he wrote is genius?”

“Everything he wrote.”

“And you’ve listened to everything?”

“Well, not everything. But a lot. As much as I could.”

“Do you know how many of his pieces ever get performed?” I did not know. He had posed the question as a great mystery.

“Ten percent!” He could not contain his exultation.

“Really!” I was astounded.

“There! Overproduction is yet another evidence that the genius is an imperfect incarnation, this time along the horizontal. Why does he have to keep driving and driving, if he’s already fully incarnate?”

“To eat?” Here I had him. “
 
‘Inspiration doesn’t sell’?”

“Hm-m, yes.” He sighed. “You know what Mozart had to pay for a new waistcoat?”

“No, I don’t.”

“A symphony!”

The night was fully dark. Here in the ravine, at any rate. We breathed in each other’s faces. We illuminated them as we lighted cigarettes. A mosquito swelled, jewel-like, on his forehead.

“May I?” I slapped his forehead.

“Thanks.”

We started climbing toward the exit, where the sky was still pale, like dilute ink.

“You should have seen that waistcoat!” he puffed, from below. “A bird of paradise! ‘Behold the lily, how she is arrayed!’ Mozart was compelled to array himself no worse
 
…
 
”

“But of course
 
…
at court
 
…
 
” I responded knowingly.

We came to the construction area. There, it was bald and unexpectedly light. Down below it was still night, totally dark. The scaffolded bell tower was especially bright, and the belfry even shone as if a separate light gleamed through it. “Astonishing!” I wanted to exclaim to someone, as if I’d already forgotten my new friend—

“Oh, yes!” he said to the back of my head. “Our own Russian Gothic. Non-functioning. Do you want to go inside?”

I did want to. He felt confident here. He had some sort of connection with all this.

An enormous wrought-iron key protruded from the door. But the door was bolted from the inside as well. He joggled it and knocked. Cawing, the ravens took off from the bell tower. They made the sky even whiter.

He knocked again and said, “He’ll open up in a minute.”

From the river, accentuating the emptiness of the dusk, a barge horn lowed like an ox. That farewell bellow almost brought a whiff of leaf smoke.

“But are they
 
…
or what?”

This remark sobered me somewhat. I pictured it too vividly.

He started banging on the door with all his might.

A gigantic, gray, serpentine creature detached itself from the dusk. I jumped and almost let out a yell. Good God!

“Linda! Linda baby! You devil!” The landscape artist patted the devil affectionately.

She was a Great Dane of dazzling horror and beauty, as white as marble.

“Is Linda tired of waiting?” The tenderness in his voice was extraordinary. “Let’s go!” he said decisively, and turned the key in the keyhole. But now another thought overtook him. He removed the key from the keyhole and proffered it to me. “Keep it.”

Perplexed, I held it in my hands. This was quite something. The size of our Great Dane.

“Keep it, don’t worry. It’s a memento for you. When you get the urge, you’ll come back.”

“But how will they
 
…
?”

“They’ll find a way. Shouldn’t lock themselves in
 
…
But nobody’s there.”

Utterly uncomprehending, I trailed after them with the key in my hand. The road went uphill, and I leaned on the key as I walked. The she-devil ran ahead, now dissolving, now precipitating out of the thickening dusk.

“An actress!” he related proudly from above. “I took her to be in a movie today. Next door here. They’re doing the Occupation. No, the German wasn’t here, strictly speaking. It’s a Novgorod scene they’re doing. She’s playing the Oberstambambramsegelführer’s pet.” He laughed invisibly, disappearing into a puddle of night. “Linda, my benefactor!” Evidently she had come running up, and now, as he waited for me, he was scratching her behind the ear. “Seven fifty for a day’s work!” he boasted, suddenly right in front of me. I bumped into him. “All the same, it’s Baroque,” he said, with either sorrow or satisfaction, staring over my shoulder, and I turned around.

From here, from above, we could see the bell tower again. The moon, as red and huge as the sun, had crept up from behind the now invisible river. A dark pink glow wreathed the sharp spire. The church smoldered like a last coal in the night.

We were going somewhere; I did not discuss where. A long, barnlike shadow solidified up ahead. At our approach a cellar window lit up and went dark.

“The refectory,” he said.

We found our way in, clattering and stumbling.

“Just a second, I’ll flip the switch,” he said, and everything lighted up.

This, to all appearances, was a restoration workshop. Carpenter’s bench, muffle furnace, shelving with canned goods
 
…
Bare bulb on the ceiling. On the wall, a movie-star calendar with Alla Pugacheva, and an advertisement for auto races. A huge, rustic bin. Similarly crude and ancient benches. Tiny barred windows stared blindly from the depths of the fortress-thick walls, as if squinting, as if puffy with sleep. Massed along the walls, like junk, like a scattered deck of cards, were layer upon layer of icons, icon frames, iconostases.

“Are you interested in panels?” I did not understand, but with his eyes he indicated the junk heap of icons.

“Oh, yes,” I said, of course.

“It’s coming, Linda baby, it’s coming
 
…
You go ahead and look in the meantime. Don’t be shy.”

Carefully I tipped back the carelessly heaped panels, one after another. The thrill of touching them was beyond my understanding.

The painter bustled hospitably. Linda circled his every step. He started the muffle furnace and set a can of food in it to warm up. He opened the bin and leaned into it, head and all; at one point his feet even left the floor. His face was red when he climbed out.

“Don’t tell me they’ve taken it!” His face expressed grave anxiety. Again he disappeared in the bin. Tattered clothes came flying out. Empty, crumpled icon frames and tin cans hit the floor with one and the same sound. “O Lord!” came his sigh of relief. “Who’d’ve guessed it was buried so deep!”

He hauled himself out, with a bottle of Russkaya vodka.

Standing there with a dark, barely discernible “Saviour” in my hand, I shared his unfeigned joy. “But who buried it?”

“I did!” he said happily.

The canned goods warming up in the muffle furnace, however, were not for Linda.

I can’t begin to convey how much I liked it here with him! And how scary it was. Who could have known I would tumble out of my ordinariness and grayness, for no reason at all, just like that, into the
present.
Such an unexpected hole
 
…
The stool had been spread with newspaper. Very cozily, with efficient masculine deliberateness and functionality, he laid out our feast. Bread, an onion, canned stew
 
…
the sparkle of two washed glasses
 
…
the broad-shouldered bottle, standing like a small bell tower.

“I suspected you right away,” he said, pouring the vodka. “What a pile over there, and you immediately pulled out the most valuable one.”

I happened to be holding the same dark panel with which I had been caught when he finally found his stash. But I did not confess.

“Stand it on the chair, take a better look.”

Thus we sat down to a bottle of vodka, the three of us, not counting Linda: Pavel Petrovich (that was the landscape painter’s name, after all), myself, and our darkened Saviour, facing us on a separate chair. Pavel Petrovich, perhaps because of his profession, saw no sacrilege in this, and I noticed none at the time.

Pavel Petrovich was not eating his bread but dunking it in the stew gravy and feeding it to Linda.

“It wasn’t pride, you know, that made me say I’m not an artist. I go there with a completely different purpose. I’m making contact! Do you understand?”

As yet, or already, I didn’t quite.

“I’m seeking my place. Not my own in particular; that doesn’t greatly concern me. But
man’s
place! You’ll never find man in a landscape. One good thing about Shishkin is, I don’t think he ever put in a single man.”

“He put in bears,” I interjected.

“But that’s the candy!”
{17}
Pavel Petrovich decided peremptorily.

“And by the way, he didn’t paint the bears himself. What—don’t you know who did it?
 
…
Once even Ayvazovsky couldn’t resist. Granted, he didn’t do it himself, either. But he asked someone to put in Pushkin for him—”

“He asked Repin,” I said, boldly moving my pawn against his bears.

“You should do crosswords,” he said, unscathed. “Whoever! And they failed! How wonderful that is! Pushkin stands there out of place, painted even worse than the sea, wearing a grin and holding his top hat away from him. But Pushkin himself, our dear one, our genius
 
…
how well he himself did all this, in his own painting! ‘Farewell, free element’
{18}
—and that’s it, he’s gone. All that remains is the gesture, the sweep of his hand. A brilliant standard of taste and pictorial accuracy. Me, all I see when I paint is my own nose. Sometimes I’m tempted to put it in, when the picture’s a failure
 
…
And it’s always a failure .. He waved away his thought as if brushing off a fly, and frightened Linda. “But every time, I don’t paint it!”

“Your nose?”

Linda left him and rested her calf-like head on my knee. This was the first time in my life I’d had anything to do with such a big dog. What a terrifying, though pleasant, weight lay on my knee! In a second she could bite in half the hand that was stroking her—

“She’d never bite,” Pavel Petrovich said. I didn’t have to say anything to him, he obviously read my mind. “All right. Let’s leave the deplorable examples aside. Let’s take something that will stand up for itself. Bruegel, now. His
Icarus.
Remember?”

I didn’t quite, but I nodded.

“Not the Younger—the Elder. You won’t trap me on that. What does he have in his landscape that comes from man? Granted, a divine man. The heel! He has Icarus’s heel! You’d never notice it—”

“But what about the plowman?” With his help, I had recalled the whole painting. “The plowman is there, plowing with all his might. Close up!”

“The plowman! The
plowman
, he says! Of course there’s a plowman, a plowman is part of the landscape. He is also, please note, seen from the back. Almost faceless. His identity doesn’t matter—that’s the point. So he’s in harmony, because he’s a part of all this.”

“There’s a ship, too. That’s not nature, either.”

“A creation is already nature! It’s beautiful, a sailing vessel. Though less appropriate in the painting than the plowman. Now, you yourself have noted all the points: the plowman, the ship, and Icarus’s heel. Best to plow, sail if you must, but don’t fly!”

“But that’s a fable already, not a painting,” I objected.

“In this case! In this case, it’s both. In and of itself, the painting in a Bruegel will never disappoint you, and the thought process—yes, in this case it’s literary. After all, that’s how they did it then, they told a story. But they didn’t forget the art of painting
 
…
And its laws were operative. Man as an individual, as goodness knows what—as the king, if you please, of nature—cannot be fitted into a landscape. You’ll never find such a thing. The heel, only the heel. Or the landscape painter’s nose, which he isn’t obliged to draw. Far more plausible and appropriate, if you’re laying claim to eternity, to stick your ugly puss through a hole that has the sea and a cypress painted around it. That’s plausible. But any attempt to paint the individual as an organic part of the landscape will be a wretched parody.”