The Monkey Link (19 page)

“You, too, shall betray me,” he said at last, softly and over-poweringly, as though leaning toward Judas at supper.

I made no answer, in the first place because I couldn’t, and in the second place—

“In the first place is enough,” he interrupted my silence. “That’s what Napoleon said.”

Judas, I think, also remained silent
 
…
And really, the Kavkaz was all gone. Here, from the darkness, the doorway shone as brightly and the day beyond it was as sunny as though there were sky, not street, just outside the door. That doorway beckoned. The welding sparks, which had seemed so blinding when we entered, now showered whitely in the sunlight. The worker, silent as ever, stepped aside to let us pass.

And there we were, in the sunlight. My sensitivity was like that of a photographic plate. I tried to hide in my own sleeve and wasn’t fully successful—the light leaked in around my edges. Pavel Petrovich, saddened by my coming betrayal, no longer spoke of the future, not even the near future. But already we were going “somewhere.” A police officer’s glance would linger on us, he would consider and assess and let us pass to the next officer. He let us pass in the same way that we passed the glass, in that same unclear rhythm. From this point on I don’t remember very well
 
…
All we talked about now was Russia. A most relentless, most forgettable conversation.

But we were making stubborn progress. Across Russia, at least. Again we were “eagerly awaited” somewhere, it seemed. We were even going to his home, it seemed. He did, it turned out, have a home. And a family. And a wife. She, too, was eagerly awaiting us. But how far it was! Up seven hills, down seven dales
 
…
On each of the hills a bottle was procured, and in each of the vales it was drunk.

I discovered myself now there, now here. Probably I was somewhere between here and there. “Here” was a green little courtyard amidst Khrushchevian five-story buildings arrayed in a square. A green little courtyard with trees that had reached adolescence in the so-soon-over historical epoch but were not yet fully grown. They stuck up around the playground along with the mushroom sunshades, the sandboxes, and the rocket shaped like a slide, and this made them look like kept-back, overgrown children, just coming home from school to our own era—they had skipped out on the last song. They had outgrown the school uniform, too. In the shade of one of these schoolgirls with knees, in the shade of a maidenly poplar, on a small domino table, after killing a bottle with some gamblers and running out to get another and killing that one, too, we played at a roulette wheel fashioned from a laundry tub belonging to a certain Georgie
 
…
There, under the sun’s mild and caressing rays, I lost all five of my remaining rubles. Pavel Petrovich won them back, after producing, with a sigh, the “three rublee,” as he called them, that he had stashed away out of his “dog money”
 
…
“Seven rubles devote to the purchase of boats, and the last three rublee
 
…
 
” Pavel Petrovich declaimed, betting on both red and odd at once, winning on both, and promptly losing everything on zero.

Our losses took us to new distances and led for some reason to a sporting-goods warehouse, which was closed, moreover, for stocktaking. But this was the very place where they really were “awaiting” us. Here, too, Pavel Petrovich was completely accepted and even needed. They greeted him gladly, paid no attention to me. An aging playboy took us into his small office, where Pavel Petrovich unwrapped a newspaper containing something like a miniature book (he had had it with him, apparently, all through our arduous journey—and had not forgotten it, dropped it, or lost it). This miniature book was none other than a freshened panel from Simyon, with the same St. Cyril and St. Methodius as yesterday. Now they shone affectionately and soberly below a Japanese calendar with a Japanese nude, whose artful pose concealed a certain shortness of leg but did not conceal the rest of her. On a gym horse the generous playboy set an elegant table for us, with caviar even. He was setting out bread and it fell off the awkward surface of the horse, I lurched to pick it up, and he waved a hand: Leave it be. But Pavel Petrovich—he tremblingly picked it up and kissed it, saying, “Forgive us, dear bread.” Although the dear bread had caviar on it. And when we had seated ourselves on a heap of exercise mats among the skis and rapiers and inhaled the wondrous smell of wood and resin, we recovered ourselves a little. I began to feel cheerful among these clumsy athletic monsters, fabricated by the disciplined workers of certain cooperatives resettled beyond our realm of consciousness—by juvenile delinquents, aged actors, the blind, and other outcastes! Cheerful, and suddenly weepy. And I did weep, hugging the sturdy leg of a vaulting buck remembered from my school days. The kind manager sympathized, very solicitously and tactfully. Comforted, I left with Pavel Petrovich for our next destination, which, as he averred, was just a stone’s throw away.

Our stone’s throw began in a now wild apple orchard preceding the city’s farthest new development. The buildings sparkled in the rays of the setting sun like a spilled box of sugar lumps, overwhelming the remnants of my consciousness with the purity and inaccessibility of the universal creative life. And the orchard, through which we were already walking, was extraordinarily large and beautiful, with its sparse, regular, soldierly array of squat and gnarled trees, each with one gnarled, speckled apple surviving in its branches. We ate the apples as we drank. Here in the thick grass, among the trees, on a beautiful gentle slope, within sight of the house where we were “eagerly awaited,” we made our last stop. This was truly a dale, a valley, dividing the next-to-last city district from the last. We no longer had any strength left. We were near our goal. A kind of termination, full of sorrow and happiness, shone in the sunset air that stagnated among the apple trees. Here was the threshold of paradise, the last hesitation line before
 
…
who knew what. We had come to the end. We drank, and my mind cleared as never before in my life. This was all Pavel Petrovich had been waiting for. As though he had been leading me to this very point for two days, deliberately and unswervingly.

“Now I will tell you what it would have been premature to tell you earlier,” Pavel Petrovich said, bright sorrow in his eyes. He laid his hand on my shoulder, the way men doubtless used to lay the sword when initiating a knight.

I was fully conscious of the supreme responsibility of this initiation
 
…

“Everything was finished by the time man arrived. Adjusted and wound like a clock. Man arrived in a
ready-made
world. There was no evolution after man. Evolution continued only in his own consciousness, repeated itself in his comprehension
 
…
But man confused comprehending with possessing, with belonging to him! The world was created by an artist, to be contemplated and understood and loved by man. But why ‘in His image and likeness’? If you have some acquaintance with men, there’s no way to understand that. The only way you can understand it is: ‘in His image and likeness’ so that man, too, would be an
artist
, capable of appreciating. The artist needed another artist. An artist can’t exist alone. The Creator needed Adam even worse than Adam needed Eve. What is Creation, what is this ready-made world? Only in the artist will you find, if not an answer, then a response, if not love, then pity. I weep with pity when I see an ordinary great painting, never mind Creation. For behind our every ecstasy lurks a sense of doom: we will sell, betray, dissipate, violate, waste! But no, surely we exaggerate ourselves even here. And only the Indians of the Yamana tribe have arrived at this idea—”

“What, what?” I said with a start. “Which Indians?”

“The last Yamana Indian,” Pavel Petrovich continued, sorrowfully and solemnly, “died in the Argentine city of Ushuaia in 1962. Tierra del Fuego was the homeland of the tribe. In the middle of the last century, they numbered three thousand people. They had no political organization, the elder’s word was law. That is, from our standpoint they were extremely low on the ladder of civilization. Low even in stature, only five feet. And they lived in huts roofed with grass or sheepskins. Yet they had a highly developed language, divided into a great many dialects, a fact which made the work of the ethnographers especially difficult. So nothing remained of them. Not a word, let alone a dialect. Only it happened that before the death of the last Yamana a doctor from the hospital in which he lay had tape-recorded him after all. The Yamana was delirious and talked ceaselessly in his haste to reveal something. The story of that tape is a whole detective novel. The tape disappeared. Later it was miraculously found, in Australia. But that’s beside the point. Along with episodes from the great tribe’s history, when they deciphered the tape they found a noteworthy Creation myth, which for the first time, I believe, treats our Creator as an artist. When the great god Nikibumatva, as I think he was called, which in translation means ‘he who shepherds the clouds,’ undertook to create a picture of life, his shadow and devil—Escheguki, I think, which in translation means ‘the dank name of the trackless being’—immediately meddled in his work. Nikibumatva knew how to create a form. Escheguki was jealous and tried to equal him in everything, but he didn’t know how to create a form and was very afraid of revealing this. Watching closely how Nikibumatva created a form, Escheguki would try to copy it, but even his copies came out ugly and warped. Then he began to pretend that he was mocking Nikibumatva, making things this ugly on purpose to show the absurdity of whatever the great god might undertake. Nikibumatva, being truly great, paid no attention, although Escheguki did his best to vex him. Nikibumatva, for example, created the form of a fish. He made many fish, until he arrived at a perfect dolphin. Escheguki, spying on his work and copying it without talent, made a corrupt form and kept adding fragments of other, incompatible creatures, which had also been perfectly created by Nikibumatva, and when he finally gave up in exhaustion, he had the crocodile. The great god created the songbird, Escheguki the bat. Nikibumatva the butterfly, Escheguki the dirty housefly. Nikibumatva would manage to make ten beautiful animals—Escheguki would corrupt them all and glue them together as one, with his poison saliva. But even Escheguki, despite his enviousness and lack of talent, learned a lot, because his secret desire was not to ridicule Nikibumatva but rather to be his equal. And now, when the great god made the noble wolf, Escheguki tried for an especially long time, but his result was the jackal. And Escheguki despaired, and Escheguki was wroth, and he contrived a gruesome joke. He began to sculpt a creature in the likeness of the great Nikibumatva, and his result was—the monkey. The great god had endured all, just so that he wouldn’t be distracted from his great work, but this he could not bear. And yet, since he couldn’t meddle with someone else’s creation, even an ugly one, and since he couldn’t prevent something already alive from living—he had neither destroyed the crocodiles, bats, and jackals nor corrected them, once they existed—so, too, he made no move to correct the monkey, this caricature of himself, but merely sprinkled on him a teardrop of his vexation and a bead of his own sweat, for he was distracted from his work for an instant and wiped away the tear and the sweat with his tired hand. And the two drops scalded the monkey, for they fell right in his eyes. Something began to happen to the monkey. He
himself
began to change, before the very eyes of his creator Escheguki. Trying in every way to imitate and resemble Nikibumatva, the monkey changed and became a man. What had created him was the teardrop and sweat of the great god, and that is why love and work became man’s fate: love sees the form, and work creates it. But that is also why man turned out to be merely ‘in His image and likeness,’ because the great god had no intention of copying himself, for he was a true creator, a far cry from the untalented parodist and caricaturist Escheguki. That is why, to this day, man is two-sided—he was created by the devil, but inspirited by God. He might have become like God in every respect, but he is prevented by his devilish nature, which he struggles against but does not conquer, because his flesh is from the devil, but his spirit is from God.”

Pavel Petrovich lapsed into a solemn silence. He filled the glass but neither drank it nor offered it to me, and fell to thinking again for a long time, like the great Nikibumatva, while I remained silent like the monkey he had inspirited, sitting at his feet and gazing up at him in adoration. Now he drained the glass at one gulp.

“You know what I understand, thanks to this myth?” he said. Now he filled the glass and handed it to me (I forgot to mention, we had only the one). “I finally understand the first sentence in the Bible—”

“
 
‘In the beginning was the Word’?” I joined in.

“You do know it all. ‘And the earth was without form, and void
 
…
 
’ So that’s what you think, it was the word. Then you writers were the first men, isn’t that right?”

Caught. I modestly lowered my eyes.

“
 
‘Word,’ in the original, is
Logos.
Knowledge. I’ve already tried to drive this point home to you, but you haven’t yet dared to understand. In the beginning of the world there was knowledge of the world—that is, an image of the world. Which, indeed, is the foundation of creative work, in any system of aesthetics. So comparing the Creator to an artist isn’t all that metaphorical, it’s accurate. Before the world existed, its image did, and if the image exists, the artist is capable of reconstructing it. In all cases, then, the image is older than the creation, as any artist will corroborate in practice. ‘The Word was God
 
…
 
’ Right? But then who was His customer, eh?”

I didn’t know.

“Why did Mozart’s ‘man in black’ never come for his order? Only because the order had been filled
 
…
The greatness of a design is the greatness of its primordial error. The artist’s design always conceals in its foundation an
assumption
, something that cannot be. This is what life is. Life, too, is an assumption. Life is the customer, it’s primordial, because only life was utterly impossible. Not only in Creation—you’ll find this error in any ordinary great work. What is false in
Crime and Punishment
? That Raskolnikov murdered the old woman. He could kill Lizaveta, the second woman, but he couldn’t have committed the first murder—he’s not that kind of man. But would the novel exist if it had been ‘according to the truth,’ without the old woman’s murder? The novel wouldn’t even exist. From the underlying incorrect assumption, endlessly rectified inaccuracies are diffused over the whole creation as the design is executed. This labor of correction and sharper definition is what creates a work of art. To incarnate an image or a word means not only to re-create it but also to
falsify
it to fit the design. The genius’s sufferings in this struggle with his primordial assumption are immeasurable, but a genius is a man who has made large assumptions. Without the design’s original falsehood, there would be nothing; only lifeless matter is exact. For there to be life, it was necessary to assume inexactness even in something exact—in the most lifeless matter. Water! That’s what reveals the Creator in Creation, and the artist in the Creator. How does water expand and contract, boil and freeze, in a manner that is unique and the most contradictory of all liquids? You’re the crossword expert, you ought to know this better than I do
 
…
From water came life, as everyone knows. Well, then, the astonishing thing is not life, but—water! Water is the heroic feat of a Creator who violated harmony in the name of life. What it cost Him is not for us to imagine. Verily, this is what He created! Water
 
…
From a drop of water to you and me it’s a shorter distance than from lifeless matter to water. Evolution is merely a novel with an inevitable denouement; possibly we’ll even close the whole book
 
…
Corrections, insertions, crossed-out passages
 
…
There’s still another basic insertion, however. Oil! No one has properly explained oil, either—the how and why of it. But suddenly, after creating life, in the inevitable process of corrections and additions, He Himself laid in a supply of oil for us, for our continuation and future
 
…
As though we really were supposed to fly somewhere in our future. But I don’t like it. What is
this
assumption compared with the greatness of the first water!”