The Monkey Link (17 page)

“Who are you?” I kept asking Pavel Petrovich.

Who was he?
 
…

“Not even one more rhinoceros! Why hasn’t there been even one more species since man appeared? And if we shudder with loathing at the sight of some spider or snake, which existed before we did and will outlive us, then what is the expression in the eyes of nature herself when she looks at us, what shudder runs over her skin? Can you imagine that look?
At us
?”

I was captivated by his intelligence, I was overwhelmed and overpowered by it, though I also had overmuch vodka sloshing around inside me
 
…
And here is why I was still on my feet. However greatly he swaggered, however long he talked, neither he nor I could alter our original situation: he was performing, and I was listening. And no matter how silent I remained—if only because I could say nothing on his level—I, too, was performing and could not retreat from my role, any more than from my supremacy of position: I was performing as the appraiser, the final instance, the technical inspector of his ideas, the quality-control inspector of his truths. One way or another, I was the person for whose sake he was talking
 
…
Something irreparable had once happened to him, there was something he hadn’t swallowed, hadn’t digested, something he hadn’t forgiven, to which he belonged without remainder and which he loved to distraction. His jealousy burned in everything
 
…
What was it he couldn’t bear? Culture, art, life itself? Or God Himself?

“The good things in life were not provided in Creation. The good things are the work of our own hands!” Pavel Petrovich’s voice rang with desperation. He was no longer closing in on his idea, he was fleeing from it, and it was chasing him. “Enough was provided so that we could fulfill our purpose. Love, death. End of program. Yet we imagine that our knowledge only begins when we abandon our program
 
…
But since knowledge, like God, is immeasurably greater than we are, neither greed nor appetite nor sensuality nor vanity will suffice for the man who begins to know. Neither Ecclesiastes nor Faust.”

Pavel Petrovich emerged through these names as though the downpour had ended, or had dissolved the glass pane. Suddenly I saw where we were. The dim light, the slimy gray walls, the garbagey cement floor. Floating in the barrel was a last huge cucumber, too long for the dipper. Its curious dull tip poked out like a little crocodile. One thing became irrevocably clear to me: we were indeed in the place where we stood, and his discourse no longer seemed to me to be hyperbole. We were indeed on the other side of the layer he had talked about. With some doubt that it had ever happened, I could recall the landscape where we had met. The truth was here, and not there; the truth, which is to say reality, was this cucumber. Madness is not what we can imagine and be scared of, madness is when we’re already
over there,
and not here. We were on the other side, and Simyon was smiling at us, because what distorted his face was a smile. He was offering me the wrought-iron key to the church.

“You’ll forget again,” he said fondly.

Because we, it turned out, were about to leave.

“You’re stoned out of your mind!” Pavel Petrovich said admiringly to Simyon, who looked very sober to me. “You could’ve let me have a toke.”

With the same frightening and engaging mask of politeness, Simyon took from behind his ear an inordinately long cigarette and offered it to Pavel Petrovich.

I headed for the door we had entered by, picturing the same scrabble in the wall and then the long-desired gulp of air and sky
 
…
It turned out I had started the wrong way. We exited through a completely different door, and there was no need to scrabble anywhere—we found ourselves right in the street, on the other side of the citadel.

“Now we’ll go to a certain place,” Pavel Petrovich said.

“But where? It’s the middle of the night
 
…
 
” Not that
I
was afraid. My flesh was. I consisted entirely of vodka, it quivered crystal clear inside me.

“We’re eagerly awaited.” Pavel Petrovich was peremptory, yet he seemed somewhat hesitant as to which way to go, right or left. He was privately weighing and deciding something.

We stood under a solitary streetlamp. The road curved around the streetlamp and went downhill, disappearing among close-ranked trees. Still thinking, Pavel Petrovich took out Simyon’s cigarette (this time from behind his own ear), then twirled it and sniffed it. He sniffed—I smelled the sweet flavors infused in the night air here: the combined fragrance of asphalt, leaves, grass, and fog was radiating warmth as it cooled. After one furtive puff in his sleeve, Pavel Petrovich handed the cigarette to me. I inhaled, and we set off.

That is, I had the illusion we set off. Because the streetlamp set off with us too, for some reason, and the road followed along like an escalator
 
…
Pavel Petrovich, of course, was talking, but I was no longer taking it in. Every now and again I dropped out of his discussion into the neighboring darkness of the street. He would support me carefully by the elbow and guide me back to a course illuminated always by the same streetlamp.

His words flowed along that course like a stream, like poetry
 
…
But they were poetry!

“
 
‘
 
…
 
He himself looks very like an ape,’
 
”
{26}
he declaimed.

I was enraptured, overwhelmed. “A wonderful line
 
…
 
”

He flickered his jaw muscles and incinerated me with his glance. As though I had mentioned Cezanne
 
…

“
 
‘O vanity! And that’s your demigod, / That’s man: though master of all good, / Of art, of land and sea, of all the world God wrought, / He cannot live two days sans—’
 
…
grub.” Pavel Petrovich cut himself short and scorched me again with his glance, as though
I
were the very embodiment of
 
…

“Did you write that?” I guessed timidly.

Great sadness flooded his brow. He shook his head in unbearable suffering.

“He is ape and Pithecanthropus and Stone and Bronze and Golden and heathen and early Christian and atheist, the tenth century is neighbor to the first, and the first to the twentieth. He wears a necktie and a loincloth, carries a sling and a submachine gun, he is slaveholder, peasant farmer, bourgeois, and proletarian, Greek, Mongol, and Russian—all this simultaneously, all this now. Not to mention that he’s both woman and man
 
…
We judge by the top floor, which he added as recently as our own time, but we don’t know which of the floors is actually inhabited in our neighbor. Maybe the fellow driving the Zhiguli is a fifteenth-century Mongolian cavalryman, and maybe the fellow in jeans is a student at Plato’s Academy
 
…
We all bend over backward to be like one another, though we insist on our
inconsequential
differences as individuality
 
…
And no one can tell us who we are. What can you say about the age of a tree?
 
…
No, don’t saw it down to count the rings!” he interrupted me. “What barbarity! Each little cell of the tree is a different age. Isn’t the bottom branch older than the top branch? And isn’t a fresh leaf on the bottom branch younger than an old leaf on the top one?”

I didn’t know. I was standing in confusion before a wild torrent that had suddenly blocked our way. Pavel Petrovich solicitously helped me step across, for it was only a pathetic trickle leaking from a water-pipe coupling. He was now developing for my benefit a theory of the fragmentariness of life—as distinct from his layer theory, in which I already believed—and was extremely angry at the Creator.

“What a heap He built! Just
think
!” he said, with an urgent new intimacy. “No plan or supervision, helter-skelter, using whatever came to hand. We martyrs, we’re the ones who people it with logic and harmony, though they don’t come easily to us, for which we then blame ourselves. But it’s the most ordinary henhouse—just very elaborate, with annexes, stairs, and superstructures—passed off as a perfect building, since we can’t see any other. Bits and pieces—lumped together! But they’re all isolated, all isolated!” he shouted. “Unfinished, unpainted, carelessly basted together
 
…
Stop!” he cried exultantly. “That’s what’s alive, that’s what’s tremendous, that’s what’s great and divine—the basting! The
thread
is alive!
It
is the presence of God in Creation! Why didn’t I think of that before!” Pavel Petrovich wept, childishly rubbing the tears around his face.

“What is it? What is it?” I implored. “What’s wrong?” I kept asking, barely able to restrain my own tears.

“I’m sorry for God!” he said. With an abrupt, manly gesture he brushed away a traitorous tear, flickering his jaw muscles like Simyon.

I was taken aback. “Well, but
 
…
how can we help Him?”

“We’re the very ones who must!” Pavel Petrovich said with conviction. “He believes in us!
We
don’t believe in
Him.
He believes in us. Do you suppose it’s easy for Him? Look at us! This is what
 
…
 
” And he started to cry again. “No, you don’t know! You don’t know!” he keened. “Why, He’s an orphan!”

“Simyon?”

“
God
is an orphan, blockhead! He’s the father of an only son, and He gave that son to us to tear to pieces. How could He, bereft of parental care from eternity, have subjected His only flesh-and-blood son to the same fate!”

This was the last thing I had expected! The drunkenness flew clean out of my head. At any rate, the streetlamp finally came uncoupled from me and stayed behind. Darkness thickened around me.

“Let me explain,” came Pavel Petrovich’s voice from the dark. “First, a question for you. Adam was created in His image and likeness. Can he be considered a son of God?”

My neck was somehow bobbing loosely in my collar. For some reason I thought an invisible huge hand was about to reach down from the sky, in the darkness, and easily tip my head back.

“He cannot!” Pavel Petrovich exulted. “Because he was created, not born! But Jesus was born! Jesus is a son. I read a heretical little book about this, can’t think of the author. You may feel satisfied with a creation, even proud of it, but that feeling can’t be called love. Only a dilettante can love his own creation—not a true creator. It’s impossible to love a creation, and impossible
not
to love a son. A creation may not satisfy you, but you could hardly correct something in it: once created, it doesn’t belong to its creator. Do you reread your books, can you correct so much as a misprint in all the copies? Do I enjoy looking at my own landscapes?
 
…
Such is the practical possibility of loving one’s creation and correcting it. The Creator can’t make contact with His Creation after it’s finished, however greatly it grieves Him. He can only destroy it. But after all, it’s alive! The Lord finds the only way: by separating Himself from Himself, by sending another self, His own son
 
…
He gives us His only and most precious child, so that the latter will finish what He Himself has been unable to do. Keep in mind, too, that not only Jesus is a man; the Creator, too, though He doesn’t descend to us, becomes a man, for He is the father of the man Jesus and thereby offers yet another sacrifice, deifying His Creation, adopting it. And then we, who were formerly a mere creation in the likeness of Him and His son, also become His children, for His son is our brother, through his mother and by blood. But, having become Jesus’ brothers, aren’t we older than Jesus? Adam is older than Jesus in time. And, like his sons—Cain was older than Abel and Cain slew Abel—didn’t Adam’s humankind become Cain, when we crucified God’s son, our own brother?”

We emerged in the light of the next streetlamp. I tipped my head back again, and now retribution spied us. I needn’t have looked up—retribution was not pursuing us from above, although possibly from on high.

Out of the darkness that we had left behind, a paddy wagon drew abreast of us and braked sharply. Two policemen leaped nimbly from the cab. One was already gripping my arm tightly above the elbow. The other raced past me and rustled heavily in the bushes, like a moose.

I looked back. The policeman boldly twisted my arm behind me. Ouch!

“Easy,” the policeman said.

“
You
go easy,” I said.

“No back talk!” he said.

“I’m not fleeing and I’m not resisting,” I said.

“True,” he said. “No place to frigging hide.”

And he smiled an open, childish smile. He himself was rather small, but his teeth were splendid and large. Why, I could take care of him, I thought, clutching the key to the church in my free hand. God saved me—I could even have killed him with a key like that.

“Give me the key,” he said then.

I gave it to him.

“Some key!” he said admiringly. “Where’d you get it?”

I couldn’t resist: “It’s my apartment key.”

The officer, fortunately, laughed instead of taking offense. He was gratified.

“Do tell,” he said, affirmatively and contentedly.

“Let go of my arm. I won’t run away,” I said.

“Got a residence stamp?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“In Moscow?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

I named my street.

“You’re a long ways off. How will you get back?”

“By taxi.”

“You mean you’ve got the money?” He was sincerely surprised. “You didn’t drink it all up?”

“There’s enough left for a taxi.”

“Show me your residence stamp.”

“But I don’t carry my passport!” This has always infuriated me.

“Tough,” he said, but he let go of my arm.

This officer wasn’t bad. The other was worse. Panting, he crawled out of the bushes on the other side of the road. How had he flown across?