The Monkey Link (41 page)

All the veterinary hospitals had just closed. Searching more and more for one open round the clock, we crossed the capital from end to end. Dear God, what a city this was
 
…
Only true misfortune will take you through such back streets. The place we live in was revealed. Soggy courtyards and slimy basements. A last matron, wielding her mop in a lighted doorway: “You’re just a minute too late, folks, Doctor left just this minute. What have you got, a kitty?” Charitable despite all, this institution.

I was sure that Zyablikov had bugged me. Wrong again. In the very first courtyard, the police showed up right behind us. First, one walked past as if by chance, eying the car, but we were standing beside it and he didn’t come over. Then another; we had only to walk away. Again, Zyablikov was the first to catch on. He removed the bug and put it in his pocket. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said.

That was how we drove, taking off the bug when we stopped and putting it back when we moved. And every time, a patrolman appeared from under the sidewalk, as though for no reason: wasn’t watching us, even seemed to be whistling and looking at the sky. We debated. The story was this. They had noticed that we had noticed, and now their overriding mission was to destroy the secret evidence. This is more important than following you: who gives a shit about you?

So we bowled along. The stocking worked out of the hole in the fender and streamed like an embassy flag. “That’s for when the ambassador himself is in the car,” Zyablikov explained. “If he’s not, the chauffeur doesn’t have the right. An ambassador’s car is extraterritorial. When you’re inside it, you’re as good as in the embassy, on the territory of your own state.”

Our car was extraterritorial. The traffic police did not stop us but merely watched us pass and went off to a booth to make a phone call. It turned out we had an escort. “Look, look!” Zvablikov pointed out the rear window, and there was a black Volga—following openly, festooned with lights and antennas and all the extras.

That was how we drove Tishka, with a flag and an escort.

This entertained us and enabled us to survive. We were laughing hard. She did know cats after all: Tishka was asleep in her arms and no longer struggling. “It brings us together,” Zyablikov said.

It also parted us. We buried him by the Kazan Railroad embankment, and that was when we forgot to pocket the bug in time. It vanished. “They had to have it,” Zyablikov said angrily. “Why did you mess up! What a piece of evidence!”

She walked away without a word of farewell, without raising her eyes.

Zyablikov and I were left alone together. “Do you at least have something left to drink?” Zyablikov suddenly looked at me with attentive eyes from which the mockery had vanished. Sighing as if he had reconciled himself to something, he followed me in, although I had nothing left. “Somehow I always get a fiendish appetite at a funeral. There’s a reason for the funeral repast.” He prowled around in search of cologne, mouthwash, quinine extract, any kind of elixir, toothpaste, even shoe polish—I had nothing, but he found, and started to make, some dried soup. I warned him that the packet was from the last resident, and it had been several years since I moved in. But Zyablikov was famed for his gastronomic fearlessness. “This is nothing. Once I ate the egg of a dragon. It was several million years old.” “The egg or the dragon?” I was touched by his attentiveness. “The egg, of course!” he said gleefully. “The dragon would have been another several years older. Well, a brontosaur. In Tajikistan. I was stoned out of my mind and horribly hungry. I set off to the market and bought a hundred eggs at once. Put them all on to boil and fell asleep. I woke up groggy, but my appetite was gone. And I had a hundred eggs, already hard-boiled. In a stupor I peeled them all and sculpted a single huge yolk. And on the surface—I thought for a minute and duly plastered it with the white. Put it on a big pilaf platter. What to do, I wondered. I phoned the local Academy of Sciences. Blah, blah, I said, found a whole brontosaur egg, have it at my house. The entire presidium came racing over in their skullcaps and robes, wearing their orders and medals on top. They sat down cross-legged around the platter and started thinking, arguing about Moscow. Finally they sent for vodka. But I laced it with dope. The venerable
aksakalli
got smashed. Again, fiendish appetite. And in their reverie they ate the whole egg. They woke up: where was the egg? They woke me. I don’t know, I said, I went right to sleep
 
…
and left the egg in your care. I don’t know what will happen now, I said. At the mention of Moscow, they were gone with the wind.”

This story failed to cheer me. “
 
‘How sad our Russia is’
{77}
—did Pushkin say this, do you think, or did Gogol invent it?” “Who the fuck knows!” Zyablikov said angrily. “I can’t call up the dead. But I can arrange a rendezvous with someone living. Anyone you want.” I didn’t understand what he meant. But what he meant was his exceptional aptitude as a psychic, which had revealed itself as suddenly as, in their time, his affiliation with Buddhism or Orthodoxy. And he meant that I could rendezvous not only with someone within our borders but also with someone unreachable, like a woman friend of mine overseas whom I passionately wanted to see just then, when my loneliness was becoming qualitatively total. Zyablikov, of course, was an insightful person, though he had also been sufficiently initiated into my life story. I don’t know which was greater here, my disbelief that he could effect such a rendezvous or my disinclination to see anyone. Once he had forcibly treated me for headache. I have a virtue: my head never aches (like a Georgian, all I have there is a bone). He twisted my head so hard that for twenty-four hours I couldn’t get rid of a very acute migraine. I submitted to this and felt better than I ever had.

“Well,” he said peremptorily, sitting me down on the shabby leather couch and sitting himself down on my right. “Where is she?” “I don’t know.” This complicated the task. He took my right hand and felt my pulse. “Close your eyes.” I did. “Think!” I couldn’t think. “What do you see?” I saw nothing. I didn’t want to lie to him.

This was a strange mixture—my utter disbelief in ESP and my desire to be totally honest in the experiment
 
…
“Come on!” he said, angrily squeezing my pulse. “Don’t resist!” Except for an upright piano (as shabby as the couch), which stood opposite me and which I stared at in surprise before closing my eyes, I saw nothing. The piano lingered under my eyelids as though I hadn’t closed them. The nuance of black reminded me of water. The water in the Fontanka River,
{78}
which the windows of my grade school had faced. I had stared out the window at that water, not listening to the drone of the teacher, just as I was now staring at the piano and not hearing Zyablikov
 
…
I was staring at the water through the classroom window and thinking that this was a Venetian window—meaning the shape of the pane. “Where are you?” came Zyablikov’s voice, from far away. I grinned. “In Venice.” “Do you know the address?” “No, how could I?” “Then ask!” “Whom?” “Anyone.” “There are a lot of them.” “The first one you meet!” He was squeezing my pulse with impatience. “Go on, what’s the matter with you!” “It’s awkward somehow
 
…
And besides, I don’t know the language.” “Ask in Russian!” he commanded. “It doesn’t work.” I felt guilty. “Board a gondola!” “But what will I tell him?” “Let him take you where he wants, it doesn’t matter
 
…
Well?” came his impatient call. “What’s up?” “We’re underway
 
…
 
” “Tell him to dock.” The boat bumped against three steps that were splashing in the water. The school was opposite. I stepped ashore by a dilapidated palazzo. “Enter!” I heard, as though from the boat. “It’s strange, there’s no entrance here
 
…
 
” “Enter from the courtyard! Go on
 
…
Is there an entrance?” “Yes
 
…
 
” My voice reached me from elsewhere, faint in the distance. “Enter!” “But there’s only a staircase here, and a small door
 
…
 
” “Open the door!” “But there are only some brooms, dustpans
 
…
 
” “Dustpans
 
…
 
” Unconcealed scorn resounded in my ear. “Pah! Go on up!” “There are two doors here
 
…
I don’t know which
 
…
 
” “Push either one! Well? Do you see her?” It was a rather dim and untidy room with the look of a bachelor’s quarters, somewhat empty; an office desk and chair stood by the slanting window. Nobody home. “Nobody home. It’s the wrong apartment
 
…
 
” “But there’s another room! Go into the next room
 
…
Well?” Someone scuttled away from me. In the half-light I didn’t immediately recognize his face. “My brother’s here,” I said. “He’s frightened.” “That’s normal,” came the satisfied voice. “Subtle bodies always take fright. Ask if maybe he has something to drink
 
…
 
” My brother, in confusion, spread up the unmade bed, on which he apparently slept without undressing, and gladly fetched a bottle from the refrigerator. He closed the door quickly. I had time to notice that the refrigerator was otherwise empty. “Well, does he have anything?” “Yes, whiskey.” “How much?” “A little less than half a bottle.” “Good enough. Hurry up and pour!” My brother bustled around and brought two glasses, hastily and poorly washed. Frightened as he had been by my sudden appearance, he was glad of this temporary remedy for the situation. He poured hurriedly, his hand shaking. “Cheers!” he said—this was the first word he had spoken—and greedily drained his glass. “Well,” I heard from the other shore, “have you drained your glass?” I was still twirling the glass in my hand, in a reverie. “He has, but I haven’t,” I reported. “Well, what are you doing!? Hurry up! Chug
 
…
chug
 
…
chug!” It echoed as though he had cupped his hands like a megaphone and shouted across a river. I made up my mind at last. “I chugged it,” I said. “You’re hi-i-igh”—the loud whisper sounded right in my ear, and a handcuff seemed to have been removed from my arm. “Now talk to him about anything you want
 
…
I’m not listening.” I was at a loss; I didn’t know how to ask him or what about. For some reason I felt unbearably sorry for him. Irretrievability—that was the word. Like a doomed man
 
…
When it’s not subject to appeal. When you also concur with the sentence. He was in his right mind, as never before. And this was a misfortune. Actually, we had nothing to talk about: everything was clear. “Why did you dream all this up?”
{79}
I asked, to ask something. “They promised to cure me, and I stayed”—that was all he answered, and suddenly he smiled Father’s weak and gentle smile. The black waves of the piano floated before my eyes again. I disembarked where I had been sitting, opposite the piano
 
…
Next to me Zyablikov was asleep, blissfully collapsed. I wanted to ask him why my brother, and about the nature of this strange degeneration of my overseas girlfriend from a woman into a man. Zyablikov could not be roused. Solicitously I lifted his feet onto the couch and covered him with a lap robe. The lap robe, for some reason, was my father’s, the one he used to throw over his chilly shoulders before his death.

All of this was from somewhere else. The lap robe, the piano, the couch
{80}
 
…
How did I come to have a piano? The piano was from Zyablikov’s apartment, which I hadn’t yet visited then. So, this wasn’t then. This happened later. But was the lap robe even longer ago than this?
 
…

I forgot the cat immediately, forever. He didn’t fit in either the past or the future. No one had noticed: at first he was simply alive, then he was more alive than dead, then more dead than alive, then simply dead
 
…
No one had noticed. The good thing about powerful emotions is that you tire of them. After this I could not live alone.

Lord, how good to have hope! Since when have we given the name hope to despair? “That’s life,” as a certain fond wife said, standing in an accessible pose, when she learned that her husband’s father had died.

I unloaded the stereo that my overseas friend Y. had given me. Distributed the money to my wives. And was already en route, aboard the plane, reading the script in which I had consented to play, not the lead role, but a central one. Hollywood is everywhere.

Hollywood is everywhere
 
…
Three hours later I was eating lamb’s-fry kebabs and washing them down with Czech beer on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Night. Wind. The night was warm, but the wind was strong. It shook the wretched board kebab shack, giving it an extra coziness. When the season ends, the filmmaking begins: we were alone on the shore. Outside was desert, inside we had everything. Having arrived before dawn, I still didn’t know how true this would prove in daylight.

I went out to look at the sea, on the pretext of the beer I had drunk. No sea. A yawning black hole, which reeked of darkness and slime. As though the sea had been locked up at the end of the season, like a vendor’s shack. Or even as though it had been stolen.

Perhaps this was some local (Oriental? Muslim?) peculiarity, to have everything at home and nothing outdoors. The chef and the waiter were playing backgammon, paying no attention to either the color television (which was on) or us or the stove. They even had a timer! No wonder they also had Czech beer. And it was as though we were the hosts: benevolent film people, deceiving ourselves with art, not too drunk, just enough, since we would be shooting tomorrow.

A diaphanous green insect, the sea’s sole representative here, crawled across the beer mug onto my hand and fixed its clever blue eyes on me. I could not withstand its gaze and closed my eyes, trying to hear the surf through the whistle of the wind. This was important to me now, as a musician
 
…
Leaves. For some reason the shore was strewn with fallen leaves. Strange. I had never seen a sea like that. As if in a dream
 
…
It
was
a dream.