The Monkey Link (26 page)

Good God! What nonsense was this! He was performing for that little blonde—roughly outlining, not his own questionable ideas (he’d never had one in all his born days), or even mine, but those of our old friend Doctor D., which the latter had confessed to me just once and retracted the next day
 
…

But never mind, talking about Khrushchev is all right now. This is even encouraged, talking about Khrushchev. Let him blab on.

“Khrushchev was always a broad-minded man. Dates didn’t count for so much during his regime as they do now. A year or ‘one day,’ he didn’t care
 
…
 
” (No, better not talk about Solzhenitsyn.) “The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of St. Petersburg or the tercentenary of Peter the Great or the centennial of serfdom
 
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Alaska or Cuba
 
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corn
 
…
 
”

“Allow me to disagree with you about Ermak Timofeev,” Dragamashchenka put in, rescuingly. “An original but somewhat schematic conception. Granted, we can still make a raft from a log cabin. But a sleigh from the raft!” An obsequious chuckle was heard in the audience. “We’re not such nomads—”

“Not nomads!” I flared. “What about all these mass relocations—Virgin Soil, Young Communist construction sites, the Baikal—Amur Railway? Who but nomads would consent to that?”

“And another thing I didn’t understand,” Dragamashchenka said, recognizing that it was dangerous to object or correct at this point. “Why exactly is the pig the king of the beasts?”

“Because it crowns the pyramid of the peasant’s farmyard. It’s the lock. What, above all, testifies to the presence of the farmer? The padlock with which he chains the gates of his farm. The farm is
his.
The padlock closes the chain. The pig closes the circuit of the farmyard, lending it the perfection of nature and revealing the Creator in the farmer. Because the design reveals the Creator. A design, in principle, is incapable of embodiment. It’s never seamless, there will always be loose ends. They can only be tied in a knot. The design always sticks out. You can’t hide it. You can try. All right, then explain to me, why oil? Why is it that oil, before man existed, was evenly accumulated all over the earth in these outhouses of living nature? As though they’d been planned for future man. Not one of the hypotheses on the origin of coal and oil has so far convinced anybody, you know. But once the earth permitted on her surface the development of life and the chain reaction of evolution, wouldn’t she be buried under the waste matter of life and the products of decay and decomposition, if it weren’t for these tidy little sacks of oil? Doesn’t the peasant farmyard resemble a balanced ecological system, precisely because of the pig? Hasn’t oil played the role of an invented pig for all nature? All right, then, tell me, why virginity for the human species? in what other animal species does it occur? and does your mother monkey have it? What kind of membrane is this, rated for a single use?”

With this he terminally embarrassed the young women and seized the undivided attention of all of them at once. The one I liked was genuinely frightened, however, and seemed to be on the point of leaving, though she was still irresolute. But the intellectual typist was gazing with frank adoration, which was exactly what I didn’t want.

“Apart from the explanations you consider mythological—Adam and Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, and the Fall, which dictate the laws of human experience for us even today and define the history of humankind through original sin and the immaculate conception of the Virgin—I’m afraid we will find no sound explanations. And we don’t need to. What we need is
 
…
 
”

And I stopped, like Daur, unable to recall what I had just said.

Daur was avenged. Or had I saved Daur? If a thing isn’t written in time, it begins to come true. Oh, these embraces of the life that once happened to you! A sort of
Toilers of the Sea,
{44}
not a text. You are embraced by an octopus, you writhe in the futile convulsions of the struggle, choke in thick layers of existence.

My unwritten novel
Gambling Fever
was happening to me. Omitted descriptions flashed through my mind.

Where is the horse? Who has been forgotten there under the fence, “in his fine red shirt, such a bonny lad
 
…
 
”
{45}
And what is Million Tomatoes?

Million Tomatoes can lift a hundred and twenty kilos with one hand. He has learned Cortazar by heart. He has a beard
 
…
My God! What contortions! What an ugly face a word can make on the page! It’s not right anywhere, doesn’t fit anywhere, doesn’t belong, and if you’ll just listen closely, it doesn’t even have any meaning. Repeat any word ten times for practice: what “table,” what “chair,” why “door”?

Million Tomatoes has had his own dealings with fame. Including those of a great cardplayer. Back in his childhood he lost a million all at once. And since he didn’t have a million, but the card debt was unquestionably a debt of honor, he had to lose not a million rubles but a million tomatoes. The winner graciously allowed him to pay the debt in installments. For about ten years, Million Tomatoes carried five or ten kilos at a time. He grew up and became strong, like Crito of Miletus, as he approached the Olympic Games of 1976, 1980, but now in 1984—no Los Angeles. He was too late with his weights, like me with my words
 
…

I was wrong about the pig, that was the whole trouble. The pig may indeed be the lock. It may indeed follow us around, ungrateful though we are, to pick up our shit. But the pig’s own shit—there’s no place to put it. No place to put that final shit. It’s no good!

This kind of thing does happen—all at once and for no earthly reason you fall silent. You stare pop-eyed and say nothing, and it’s not the connection between the words, it’s not the words you lack—even the letter is insurmountable. You lack speech itself. You are silent for a month, a second month, you begin to be silent for a third. You hear applause, shake hands, reap prizes. Grateful listeners have long been waiting for you to have a drink with them. And two, three, four more people—Adgur-Raul-Rauf in one person, and Million Tomatoes, it turns out—have long been standing behind you like two guardian angels, they have long been impatient for you to finish your talk, to take you and Daur to a certain place where people are waiting just for me.

Daur and I each received the skull of a female monkey as an honorarium. The date of her death had been scrawled in soft pencil on her forehead. One could now date the narrative with greater precision. This was in autumn, and she had died that summer; the year was 1983. I think it said July 17. “July” was written with the Roman numeral VII. The pencil wrote especially well on the bone surface, as if on some very heavy and expensive Chinese paper, so porous, the color of ivory. But the pencil rubbed off. For some reason the date was erased in reverse order, first the year (but I remember the year), then the month, and then for a long time the day was left, suspended in timelessness. Lest I erase it completely, I kept turning the skull different ways—whereby I kept erasing it. Her birth date, however, had not been recorded with the same precision. Dragamashchenka examined her teeth and said that she was no more than two years old. One tooth in the left lower jaw was loose, probably the canine. She was a girl. Her name was Lucy. Or Margarita, I don’t remember. Of course, Lucy. Not Margarita. Margarita was the name of the other one. Not the other one they gave to Daur—I didn’t even take any interest in the name of that one—but the one in the audience, whose address
HE
had time to get, while I stood silent, disgraced by my own silence, and tenderly stroked my monkey on her bald head. H
E
had time for everything, as Million Tomatoes and I dragged him toward the exit: time to grab a test tube of alcohol from the light buffet that the girls had arranged in my honor, to eat a Greetings cracker with it, and to get the phone number of the one he liked, the one I liked, and the old acquaintance whose eternally inviting gaze, so languid with shyness as to be indecent, I should not answer under any circumstances: she was staying at a resort hotel not far from here with her son, who was in kindergarten.

And so, having been seen to the door by our dissatisfied audience, who continued to wave to us from their laboratory threshold, with modest and perhaps even blue kerchiefs, we rode off in two cars, a Gorky jeep and a Volga 21, climbing more and more steeply into the mountains. And while
HE
celebrated his triumph by recounting an odious drunk-tank incident which had taken place in my student days and which struck him as entertaining and jolly for some reason—while my friends gave him dazzling smiles and nodded knowingly—I relived my shame. With Lucy perched in my lap, I sadly stroked her receding forehead and looked out the window. Through the vibrating, cloudy little window installed in the well-traveled canvas of our jeep, I increasingly saw the side of the road: a cow warming her udder on the warm asphalt
 
…
a piglet unhurriedly trying to penetrate a fence, squeeze through it despite the triangular frame on his neck
 
…
suddenly
 
…
a man was lying at the side of the road, still wearing the same fine red shirt, with his arms serenely outflung in a way that doesn’t even happen
 
…
and I had seen him somewhere. Million Tomatoes passed me his reefer. I took a reluctant toke, eyeing his inordinately large fist, with which I had seen him pound a nail into an inch-thick board
 
…
But having tried it, I took another toke. “Good grass?” Million Tomatoes asked proudly. And really, I did feel better. “Good
 
…
 
” I even thought that
HE
had left me for a seat in the Volga traveling behind us, in order to tell the same old story to the other crew
 
…
“Good”—at last I was able to pronounce a word, though what I meant to say was “Papa!”

For this was Papa. He was contained in a smallish blue cup on Mama’s lap, as though he had been won in a minor competition, and my mother was gently stroking him as if he were alive. The resemblance to a trophy was heightened by the diagonal gold script: what he had earned the cup for. For his
final
date, he had been awarded both a birth date and a proper name. This was indeed a trophy. The only one of its kind, the first, unique. Papa, forgive me for that letter!
 
…
Mama and I were in the back seat of this same kind of car, a Volga 21. We were taking him to our cemetery at Shuvalovo. The driver was the husband of a niece of my father’s, in other words a cousin-in-law of some kind, or anyway my cousin’s husband, Chereshnya by name, proud of his automobile, his origin, and his scholarly degree, a nice fellow and basically not stupid, who played at being a churl but wasn’t a churl at all—a kind, ugly man. He was surprised at the force of Mama’s emotion. “What made you love him so much?” he asked her, with his characteristic bluntness. Looking forcefully into his eyes, which glinted dully in the cheerless long face canceled by his nose, Mama said with all distinctness, “His beauty.” Chereshnya, as I have said, was not a fool, but now he, too, understood.

The return from the cemetery
 
…

Again, we hadn’t arrived at the promised monkeys.

The tooth came out of Lucy’s jaw by itself and was easy to put back in. I would have to be sure not to lose it, I reminded myself. And now we arrived.

They were expecting us. The liberated populace had finally gotten through the fence pickets. They kissed us on the shoulder. They waited on us. They didn’t have bread and salt on an embroidered guest towel here, but they did have the towel itself. One dignified woman held the soap and the kettle, another the towel. They poured for us while we washed our hands, and then passed us the towel. Both women, as they later explained to me, were Supreme Soviet deputies, one to the Abkhazian ASSR, the other to the USSR. These were villagers.

And in fact there was a village here. My drunken Russian heart thrilled and sobbed. This was what it meant to have an uninterrupted life of three generations! It meant wealth. Impossible even to compare—I did not tire of comparing. In place of the two-story Abkhazian stone house on pillars or pilings, I substituted our leaning, five-walled log cabin; in place of their traditional
agazon
(lawn) in the farmyard, I imagined a puddle, the clay-and-dung slop trampled by cow and boot; instead of their orchard—fig, persimmon, apple—our modest little vegetable patch with its onions that had once again failed to come up; and instead of their hydraulic pump, our little farm pond, teeming with life like a droplet under Leeuwenhoek’s lens
 
…
The sorrow of the patriot welled up within me, in proportion to my admiration for their well-deserved plenty. The climate, of course. In our country such things don’t grow. Here, just poke a finger in the ground—lemons, mandarin oranges
 
…
In our country we have
winter.
In our country, just try and take anything outside the house. Here they have the kitchen separate, the livestock separate—they can run across the yard on the lawn. In our country we have to keep one flank pressed to the stove and the other to the cow, lest we freeze to death. They have it easy. Thus reasoned the patriot within me, the city dweller who in his fifth decade had guessed the secret of our “five-walled house”: it has nothing to do with our five-pointed star, it’s the wall in the middle, which divides the log cabin into a lived-in half and a roofed barnyard.

Now the same women passed shot glasses of
chacha.
So we were still standing out in the yard. Not only were the yard, the lawn, and the house theirs, but the elaborate iron gates that locked what was “theirs” were also theirs. And the
chacha
was theirs.

With this slightly different nuance: not store-bought. Theirs and their own—in the sense that they had produced, prepared, made it. But so were the yard and the lawn and the orchard—they were THEIRS, like the
chacha.
It was strong
chacha.