The Monkey Link (43 page)

What made me especially proud was that I did an end run around Valery Givivovich, Colonel Adidasov—tricked him like a baby. I so sincerely yearned to participate in the roundtable on the Georgian novel, so keenly felt the injustice of their refusing me even this, my human right, that I had planned to go to Sukhum—but there were no tickets. Now, the Colonel could easily help with this. But here, too, he dodged: “What do you want with that stinking Sukhumi? Better Batumi.”
{88}
“I’m interested in the monkeys,” I insisted sourly. “Plenty of monkeys there. Go to Batumi, I have a house there. You can stay with me.” Again he proposed that I go there “in sneakers.” I played stubborn and did not consent to Batum. “This has been very difficult,” he hinted to me the next day, “but you may now take part in the roundtable. Just refuse television, it’s not worth it
 
…
You may move into the Hotel Abkhazia today. They’ve booked a room for you along with the participants.” Marvelous, that “along with”! As if he didn’t know I was already staying there! They transferred me from one floor to another. And it was the same room number, fourteen. They were already waiting for us on that floor. Two unshaven men of junior rank. Adidasov consigned me to them with a too noticeable eye movement, and they nodded. “I’m leaving you alone,” he said, after escorting me to Room 14. I was delighted, and I swelled with self-respect: were they doing this so overtly on purpose, or out of ineptitude? In either case. Here it was, the secret formula of the psychocannon! Inside the computer sits a sergeant
 
…

If they were pointedly noticing me, I was pointedly not noticing them. In my hotel room I was writing “The Homeland, or Tomb,” as if preparing to report on the difference between the Latin American novel and the Georgian, as exemplified by
The Tin Fleece of Victory,
and giggling at my perfidy, which no one expected of me. It was the eve of the November Seventh holidays; the roundtable participants were to assemble on the ninth; I had time, and I used it. I did have one loyal friend, my Georgian brother, who had volunteered to help me. I hadn’t explained everything to him, however—he was glancing over his shoulder as it was—just the difficulty with the tickets. My friend didn’t particularly like these anniversaries, either. He, too, had once been baptized by Father Tornike.

On the night between the sixth and the seventh, after making sure I was not under outside surveillance, I slipped out of the hotel. It’s good to travel light! For a long time now, I have carried nothing with me except manuscripts and socks.

We puttered about in the semi-darkness like thieves—packing for the trip, trying not to wake the household, driving out of the courtyard in a whisper. Tiflis was growing light as we drove out of the city. It was the most deserted, pre-holiday morning, without even a single policeman—everything was asleep until the parade. The highway was equally empty. The houses slept, the trailer trucks slept by the roadsides, the Traffic Patrol posts slept. Nature alone opened her eyes ever wider. Good heavens, what a morning this was! Hard to believe that all this had been just around the corner. Why hadn’t we hurried, all our lives, to wake a little earlier and go a little farther? I was seeing the mountains. No one else—not Pushkin, not Tolstoy—could say more. This was “it.” When you no longer ask yourself the question, What is it? You simply inhale and don’t exhale. Blessed was the earth on the morning of November 7, 1984, on the road from Tiflis to Kutais!

Autumn had made a special effort, giving forth all its colors, and every leaf shone with a separate hue. Persimmons flamed in the thinning treetops. Autumn was gathering its last, its final harvest—the harvest of colors. “Do you notice how
different
this red is?”

We were terribly pleased with ourselves and each other. We had
escaped.
My friend, fortunately, did not guess how right he was. He supposed we had escaped the parade. While everyone back there would be gathering in columns and carrying signs
 
…
Freedom. It’s eternity. That was what we were leaving for. In sixty-six years, for all their efforts, they had succeeded with nothing. Look, a cliff! look, a stream! look, the sky! look, the leaves
 
…
Nature is not a Bolshevik. You’ll never teach her to do shoddy work.

Thus we lavished praises on each other. Content, my friend began to doze off and surrendered the wheel. I drove and was happy all over again, this time alone. The sign said “Gori,” but we didn’t need to go to Gori. The sign pointed not to the right or left, however, but to the sky. I was forced to wake my friend in order to choose a direction. He sleepily waved to the right.

A town came into view. Something was wrong here, but I didn’t want to disturb my friend again. It bothered me that the road led ever more steeply down into a hollow, to a city built up in an ever more extravagant and ugly style. At the bottom was a square. I didn’t know where to go next. There was no one to ask—the city was still asleep. Could I have gone astray and somehow returned to Tiflis? That would be like me. I stopped the car in the middle of the deserted square and got out.

All I could see from the car was a flower bed. When I got out, I saw a pedestal. It was a huge pedestal. Sliding my gaze upward, I saw the boots. They were gigantic boots! And then, all this: the skirts of a greatcoat, the hand beyond the cuff, the gaze into the distance, the service cap, the mustache. He seemed to be licking his chops, an iron cat
 
…
Then came the sky. The monument had been so designed that when you were at the foot of it the Leader’s head was projected against the sky, higher than the surrounding hills. The smile of the Gori cat floated like a cloud.

“Look!” I yelled.

“How did you land here?” my friend said, waking up.

The whole thing struck us as momentous and symbolic. The discussion lasted all the way to Kutais. “Look at that, what force! He reached us even from there. We shouldn’t have boasted so.” I agreed: no place to frigging hide. And we thought we’d escaped!

…
 
And so,
we
were the first in all the land, the only two men on our entire sixth of the earth, who had managed to greet both the dawn and the only monument not yet taken down. Stalin had been born here. We had visited his Mecca.
“I’ll get you!”
{89}

We needed to purify ourselves. We had no plan, and we didn’t discuss it. The road itself led us. Wordlessly, we found ourselves at Motsameta. Autumn, as best it could, had warmed the day. I caught the fragrance of the cloister—cedar, juniper, laurel. There was a silence as still as a pillar. The blood rang in my ears like a cicada. I had not been here since that day
 
…
If I counted that day as the day I was truly born, I could appear here a second time only to die. I was quite willing. I lay down on a flat, warm stone overgrown with lichen. A cloud passed above me, like my whole life. What do people mean when they say that their whole life passed before their eyes in the last second? Probably just that: not life’s sequence of insignificant events, but its equality to a single instant. I wanted to die, as a way to live, not as anything else. As though, of all the modes of living, death alone remained. This was unfrightening, secretly treasured and welcome, as though I had been waiting and it had come: Now death will enter, forgiving you your life, she will put her arm around your shoulders, and you will go willingly, you will trust her completely. The state of expectation—this I didn’t want to change, not for anything. I lay there, supine on the warm stone, almost without breathing, merely steeping myself in the rosined dry air, everything I could see consisted of sky—my eyes were neither open nor closed. It was strange to blink all this away. But yes, I had blinked at last, and my Georgian brother instantly got up from his stone: to confess his sins and take communion. I agreed with him immediately. Just right. The one did not contradict the other. And yet, the desire to take communion was not what had roused us! That was why I was unconsciously surprised at myself while we hunted for Tornike all over the cloister and he wasn’t there. That was it: Who had ordered me to stand up? Who had said that it wasn’t time yet? Who had said, “It would be nice to die here”? “Don’t wish for too much, Rezo
 
…
 
”
{90}
It was I who had said this, to him. I had merely thought I was ready. I proved unready, and stood up. What force! What tribulation
 
…

No Tornike anywhere. No people. A few hens. How much they looked like kerchiefed parishioners waiting for the church to open—pecking sedately, as if gossiping. A brindled Great Dane pup, Tornike’s pet, ran past without looking or barking. So Tornike must be here, too
 
…
We knocked at the house. A young monk opened the door with an air of displeasure and resignation. Tornike was away: he was vacationing at the Central Committee’s cardiology sanatorium in Borzhomi. I greatly desired to write him a letter—despite all, I was his godson. And suddenly the brother admitted me to Tornike’s study without hindrance. True, he hung over my shoulder. I twiddled my pen in torment, and he walked away after all, though he kept me in sight. On the walls hung icons, canvases painted by Tornike himself: Queen Tamara,
{91}
the severed head of John the Baptist
 
…
“Hung” is the wrong word: they had been stuck up at the corners with thin bits of church candle, as with Scotch tape. On Tornike’s desk, a pretense of unfinished work had been neatly tidied: an open, much-thumbed Georgian book—the Gospel, none other—and a faint Russian typescript, samizdat, the nth copy. I couldn’t help peeking
 
…

The brother relaxed when he saw that I was writing, and even left me alone. I scribbled faster and faster, overwhelmed with
 
…
“Come ye therefore, brethren, hear the voice of Christ, and let us ever be watchful in obedience. This parable the Saviour saith for our salvation: he came not for the sake of the righteous, but for the sake of the sinful, that they might be saved. Two men, he saith, went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican
 
…
 
”
{92}

Thus I wrote and wrote, with a strange assiduousness and emotion, as though the words were my own, and from outdoors my friend impatiently hailed me to drive on, while the brother more and more patiently refrained from disturbing me. At last, folding the sheets of paper, I rose and told the brother I had changed my mind about confessing in writing; I would stop by in person on my way back, when Tornike would have returned from the sanatorium. The last thing I remember was a cheval glass cluttered with French perfume. What a shame I couldn’t kiss Tornike on his fragrant beard! My friend put me on a bus going to Sukhum, and we parted secretly displeased with something in each other.

No
Monkeys
!
Soldiers of Empire
—that was what I had to write, immediately! The whole past day—or was it a month, or a year—was compacted into a neat little slab, like a chocolate bar, and marked off in rectangles as taut and domed as the belly of a physical-fitness buff. After that, everything happened of itself. I definitely wasn’t going back to Tamysh, but as ill luck would have it, I had left my Sukhum addresses back home. I went out to the embankment, certain that I would be surrounded by old friends within a minute. Nobody. Even at the Amra there was nobody. The only one to come along was Dragamashchenka—he arranged everything, then and there. An hour later I was sitting in my own room in the snow-white Abkhazia, which is impossible to get into, and writing this sudden novel. My plywood Room 14, which, by a tenacious irony, I had inherited from the Englishman, resonated with my typewriter like a percussion machine. Conspicuous on the ceiling, in the middle of the fake Finnish gloss, was an authentic white Soviet square. The cat and the rat lived above it as before, supplementing my orchestration with live sounds. Out on the embankment a tour guide was touting a sea excursion, in the nasal voice of a muezzin.

We were writing. Not I alone. “We were many in the bark. Some raised the sail
 
…
 
”
{93}
I gave forth a steady drumming,
HE
sustained the pauses, the mouse and cat put in the punctuation marks. Everything fitted.

Soldiers of Empire!
I, too, had reached the Pontus. Not metaphorically—I could see it from my window, and it certainly wasn’t streaked with blood. I had no time to look out at the sea with any kind of thoughtful expression, either. I wasn’t having thoughts, I was leading my detachment. This was it:

Dryunya, in a chafing loincloth sewn from two Pioneer neckerchiefs, like swimming trunks, as in that childhood when there were no swimming trunks for sale, when all of us got baptized as we emerged from the little river at camp, and the cross gleamed like a sword in the blinding sun;

Saltyk, stumbling over his guitar and taking offense at the nickname Anacreon, just as he had when I once called him a “Russian Fet”
{94}
—taking offense not at what was said, but who said it;

The Eye, who had retrained himself to hold his sword in his left hand so that he could see it;

The Afghan, munching the last of his brainy flat bread;

My Georgian brother, who had grown a beard, which was why he was being transformed into a woman;

The Murmansk drifter, dragging behind him a baby carriage full of manuscripts, the chronicle of our expeditions;

Tornike, who baptized us all from one glass, as was proper for a company, but we were a platoon—we got some extra drops;

Victoria, our Victoria! with her blind guide embracing a harp;

Zyablikov, our navigator, who lapped up our reserve supplies but stuffed us with dinosaur egg and other marvelous legends;

The Inventor Brothers, incessantly drawing the Trojan horse in any sand they came to;