The Monkey Link (38 page)

To wipe a tear, I thought, but he stood up. “Pardon me,” he said, and went to the loudspeaker. He undid the knot in the cord and sat down again, comforted: now there was order. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “I haven’t told you anything unusual. Anything secret. Only the date—that the whole thing started a day earlier than reported
 
…
but it’s not that much of a secret.”

We left together. I glanced with scorn at the editor waiting for us, and silently we walked right past her. Walked right past and on out to the street—waiting there for me all this time, and waiting there still, was good old Dryunya, my best buddy, a saintly man. It was his principle to drink as his hair-of-the-dog the same thing he’d drunk the day before, in the same amount and with the same man. The three of us went around the corner, out to the boulevards, to a Nadenka.
{68}
At that hour they were still serving. We had one beer apiece, and then Dryunya argued over who would pay for whom. The major paid, and we exchanged phone numbers.

Life itself was setting me an example: the Eye, Jason, the Afghan
 
…
One had to struggle with himself to make sure that what he saw before him was indeed what it seemed, and not what it was. One had to struggle! Make positive efforts! Regardless of whether they could become reality. I responded. I hired myself out to chauffeur a certain monk around the country roads of Vladimir Province. I left the cat in the care of my neighbor the singer. We inspected the abomination of desolation of ruined churches, and were desolated. The monk was a venerable thirty years old. His wisdom and maturity were equaled only by his inexperience. He was old enough to be my father, young enough to be my son. On the lenslike Vladimir meadows he gamboled like a calf, his cassock collecting all the pollen, and there were more flowers than the eye could see
 
…
I accompanied him in silence. He felt like asking me—but couldn’t. He wanted me to ask him—I don’t know what. “You see,” I said at last, plucking up my courage, “I believe in the Creator, I believe in Christ, I believe in the Virgin Mary. But there’s no way I can believe in the devil, that he actually exists
 
…
 
” “Then what
do
you believe in!” the monk said indignantly. “Why, the air is swarming with them!” He gestured expressively, his arms describing a wide circle, and strode away from me in wide paces across the meadow. He was soon distant, and suddenly, for the first time, I noticed that he in no way perverted the not-yet-lost beauty of the Vladimir meadow! A monk—that’s the man of the landscape! Moved, I gazed after his small pyramid. It harmonized easily with the landscape: under the cassock, you couldn’t see that he had two legs
 
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Could that really be the whole problem?! “Sanctified be thy chariot!” he said when we arrived safely. The automobile was sanctified, and I caught a whiff of smoke and burning, this time from none other than me, when I climbed in to drive home
 
…

A new guest was already waiting for me by the house. In his little Zaporozhets coupe. Straight from Murmansk.

“We have enough grief without you not drinking,” Dryunya told the guest from Murmansk. But the man didn’t drink and didn’t smoke. And also—as we gradually guessed. Not what you might think in such a case, but just the reverse. Snow-white collar, razor-sharp crease in his trousers, loose pullover hanging from his shoulders, very neat crew cut with glints of gray. Thin, well built, supple. And shaved! His skin
 
…
a sort of special skin, a generation younger than he was. He spouted Kuzmin
{69}
by heart. How had he climbed out of his Zaporozhets looking like this?
 
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If he didn’t drink, he could at least make a quick trip to get a bottle. Oh, he didn’t know the city. Dryunya readily volunteered to show him. Oh, he didn’t have room in the car: it was packed solid with household belongings, and he had even removed the front seat. We didn’t believe him and went out to look. Indeed, the whole car was crammed with books and ironed shirts. “
 
‘Everything I own I cart with me’?” I asked. He indulged my joke. It turned out he was a drifter, turned out he was homeless.
{70}
He had the car, it seemed, but no residence permit. He had spent the summer drifting. Toward winter he had set out for southern climes, via Moscow, naturally, via me, naturally. A slew of people arrived, Dryunya’s family, the Great Gatsby’s guests. Rabbit’s friends and relations: U.B., a retired KGB colonel, Ustin Benyaminovich, simultaneously a grandfather and grandson (his grandmother was still alive enough to idolize him). Einstein, an Armenian, raw-vegetarian, and janitor, always good for a debate on the topic, Is vodka a raw foodstuff? And the singing Saltykov himself, a Saltykov from the sadistic Saltychikha’s line, not from the ones who were satirists and Shchedrins.
{71}
He walks right in, singing loudly:

Thus stone by stone, brick by brick,

We pulled that factory down!
 
…

Then a young damsel arrived to save me from another who had arrived just the moment before. Not joining in our party, the guest from Murmansk led me out of the kitchen into the other room for a conversation alone together, and—it wasn’t immediately what everyone immediately thought, but to get me to read, in his presence, then and there, his manuscript. Granted, not a large one. We concurred in our assessment of Nabokov. There I gave him his due. But in my assessment of his text I was a disappointment, didn’t pass his examination, so to speak. The tête-à-tête was a failure. And he couldn’t hide a slight grimace of disgust when he once again inhaled all our stink. The women were crying on Saltykov’s shoulder.

To water do not speak of love!

She cares not for us, she runs through the pipes
 
…

Water—that was the women themselves, of course. Never mind about the pipes.

Zyablikov, too, showed up, a Pavel Petrovich in his own way, a rare guest—and immediately provided drinks all around. He had smoked all the grass of the Buddhists, drunk all the church wine of the Orthodox, and now he outdid himself as a psychic.

And in truth, his power of persuasion was colossal. “Absolutely, you have a bug here somewhere. I smell it
 
…
 
” Cockroaches, yes, but I prided myself on not having bedbugs. “Come on, you know what I mean!” The bug proved to be an eavesdropping device. Zyablikov half closed his eyes and began making passes with his hands. “Here,” he determined, pointing to the ventilation grille. “Know what you should do?” I still didn’t know. “Rip off the grille
 
…
Do you have any kind of lance?” Well, a poker. “Rip off the grille,” he insisted. “Take the poker and
go at it
 
…
 
” He made a savage face. “Crash! Run it through!” He plunged an invisible lance into it and suddenly looked like St. George the Dragon Slayer. There was even something Georgian about his ordinary, snub-nosed face. Dryunya performed the whole procedure, gesture for gesture. They hadn’t found the poker—a fragment of my only mop was left sticking out of the mutilated vent.

The girls, without ever choosing, departed with Saltykov and Zyablikov, in complete harmony. And I was left alone with Dryunya, as always. He instantly took it upon himself to propose toasts, and this he did for a long time. I endured it, because he was claiming that I was a genius, and it was hard to outargue him
 
…
“Our whole misfortune,” he sighed, “is that we have absolutely no Salieris!” “Sure,” said the girl who had returned after all, “but we have a shitload of Mozarts.” We had a good laugh.

H
E
was offensive—I was offended. The girl proved to be a lady, an ex-wife. Dryunya was a knight. He couldn’t bear to see her treated this way. “And what do you have in your briefcase? What’s in it? Nothing. Your lousy briefcase is empty!” Anger scalded me. And it was no longer Dryunya who dared to say such a thing to me, but Sergunya, our good old mutual friend.

H
E
tore Sergunya’s shirt and crowned Dryunya with a bowl of lump sugar. They both danced around in a Cassius Clay stance, but they spared the national treasure, never did land a punch. The lump sugar proved to be sharp. Badly scratched and unable to keep his feet, Dryunya was escorted out by the lady, who now scorned me.

At last, I was left alone. Alone, alone! Alone in all the universe! Abandoned, unneeded by anyone
 
…
I had done it, achieved what I was trying to achieve. “What we fought for has been our undoing.” How it all stank!

I went into the bathroom to wash away the shame
 
…
So this was why it stank! In the washbasin lay Dryunya’s huge turd—he had closeted himself to wash the lump-sugar wounds that I had inflicted. “But so uncomfortable!” I exclaimed in delight. “Up high! on one leg! and the toilet right there!”

This was indeed a catharsis, in the sense of a purging. While I was cleaning all this up, it turned my stomach. Oh, God!

And someone rubbed against my leg.

Tishka! Little Tishka!
 
…
My darling! You’re all I have
 
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How could I forget you, what a prick I am! But you’re hungry! Coming, coming, my pet
 
…

This was what I needed. Just what I needed! I needed to feed someone. How simple. I simply had to feed someone. And none of your high-flown
 
…

An old man’s simple, quiet, deliberate, solitary movements. Take fish out of freezer. Run hot water. Put fish under water. Coming, coming, be patient
 
…
 
You can’t eat it raw, it has to be cooked just a little
 
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Here.

My wife had left, my family had returned.

This was good, this was terrific. Good not to be alone in bed! A book, a cat. No complications. Purr, purr
 
…
What’s that little motor you’ve got there, where is it housed in you?
 
…
“The men still slept in the postures of yesterday’s weariness
 
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The sleep of the dead. As though they, too, had been overtaken by the enemy’s sword and spear. As though they, too, had not departed from yesterday’s field of slaughter. Jason began to moan and swing his head like a bull, trying to shake from his eye sockets the sight of the lost battle. Red. All was red. Red waves under his eyelids. Jason started down to the sea. The morning dew washed yesterday’s dust from his sandals. The sea, too, was blood. The Pontus Euxinus rolled its dawn-pink waves. A sea of blood!”

Bloody foolishness!

Decisively I put out the light. Tishka rumbled on my exhausted breast. Patches of light from the Kazan Railroad wandered across the ceiling, diesel engines lowed to each other, and the dispatcher’s mild-mannered obscenity, amplified by a megaphone, floated freely over the sleeping capital: “Bastard, where do you think you’re going?”

I was happy. I slept.

And woke at cockcrow. I was frightened. Whence a rooster? And where was I?

When a church bell pealed, I felt calmer. Could it be? Already?

But Tishka’s heroic snore resounded on my breast. He was decidedly alive. And if he was alive, I, too, wasn’t dead. Most likely a decree had come out, and I hadn’t even noticed that it was permissible to ring the bell once, in one church, on major holidays. Must be Andropov’s doing. They said he had even permitted a monastery. He had permitted a lot of things, though. It was all right now to sell potatoes and dill again, over there at the train, like after the war. And he had permitted people to set up a stove in the garden shed. And he had fitted vodka back into the five-ruble note
 
…
He might even be a good man, at heart
 
…
But why was he doing this to me? Perhaps, while he was at it, he had also permitted roosters to be raised on balconies?

Or perhaps, finally, all was over. No Korean airliner, no Afghan
 
…
Church bells pealing, cocks crowing.

But none of this was true. Someone had been battering at the door for a long time.

Tishka meowed resentfully at the way I jumped up. My heart pounded in the unwarranted hope that this time it was she. The woman, the only one, the sixth, who had gone away forever. “Come on, Tishka,” I even said, “let’s go meet the mistress.”

At first I saw only roses. All covered with drops of morning dew, it seemed. Opalescent, not yet open—I hadn’t encountered such a luxuriant bouquet for a long time. The bouquet entered headlong, as if being chased. “You don’t remember me, but we’ve met
 
…
 
” I was flattered. To an author, after all, roses are no joke. They are dear, both precious and pricey. To which of those bastards, those party secretaries and chief editors, would some unknown young woman bring roses! This was the reward of disgrace. Roses for my withered laurels
 
…
Then and there, she asked to put them in water. “Of course, of course! Such
 
…
roses!” I went into a flurry, tearing off the cellophane. She took the bouquet, almost snatched it. I yielded with some bewilderment. Well, yes, women always know best how to deal with roses
 
…
Now she’ll start peeling the stems, she’ll ask for sugar, a hammer, aspirin, a vase, coffee, vodka, cotton, a bathrobe, she’ll go into the bathroom
 
…
She went into the bathroom, carefully straightening the cellophane on the bouquet, and ran water into the washbasin. The sight of the rose-filled washbasin overwhelmed me.

I can’t stand people who put their faces too close to mine. As though they were a goblet. Either they’re nearsighted, or they’re sure they’re irresistible, or they have bad breath. My admirer proved to be a writer; she had brought her manuscript, I was right on her way to the station, she was going to meet (she didn’t say whom), but not for another hour, and she had decided to bring it by. Even Tishka she put too close to her face. I took both Tishka and the manuscript away from her and hinted that she would be late. She was unembarrassed by this—but embarrassed by my quite insane stare, meeting hers in the mirror over the washbasin. Had she only known that this was laughter! I watched the water run off the cut stems into the
clean
washbasin. Two items—evening and morning—resonated together in it. A rhymed couplet. Good thing there was a space between the lines. What would have happened if I had flopped onto my cot just as I was, without washing, which as a rule
 
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