The Monkey Link Read online

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  Andrei Bitov’s first novel in almost a decade is a challenge to the form. Full of talk, philosophical speculation, and dark humor, The Monkey Link presents a highly original view of the world and of the former Soviet Union.

  Andrei Bitov wrote the three tales in the novel between 1971 and 1993, while the Soviet Union moved from peace to war to collapse. The first tale was published in Russia in 1976, but the second did not appear-and the third could never have been written-until after glasnost. As time flows through the novel, the changing fortunes of the author, the hero, the censor, and their country generate a very complex set of ironies.

  On the simplest level, The Monkey Link is a novel in three acts, a comedy of ideas. In the waning years of the Empire, a poet traverses Russia, from the Baltics to the capital, to the shores of the Black Sea. Along the way, he discusses man’s place in the scheme of things with, among others, a very sober scientist and a very drunken landscape painter. He is harassed by the authorities, spends time on a movie set, and is an eyewitness to the August 1991 coup.

  Intricate in its structure but sweeping in its concerns, this exciting novel confirms Bitov’s position as one of the most important writers in Russia today.

  MONKEY LINK

  A Pilgrimage Novel

  ANDREI BITOV

  Translated by

  Susan Brownsberger

  FARRAR, STRAUSS AND GIROUX

  NEW YORK

  Translation copyright ©1995 by Susan Brownsberger

  Originally published in Russian Copyright © 1994 by Andrei Bitov

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bitov, Andrei.

  The monkey link / Andrei Bitov : translated by Susan Brownsberger. —1st ed. p. cm.

  I. Brownsberger, Susan. II. Title.

  PG3479.4.I8M66 1995 89i.73’44—dc20 94-18864 CIP

  Table Of Contents

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  THE FIRST TALE Birds (Catechesis)

  THE SECOND TALE Man in a Landscape (the Novice)

  THE THIRD TALE Awaiting Monkeys (Transfiguration)

  I. THE HORSE

  II. THE COW

  III. FIRE

  1. The Cat

  2. The Monkey Link

  3. The Cock

  FROM THE TRANSLATOR The Boundaries Within

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  Nothing in this book is fictitious except the author.

  —The Author

  The author asks the blessing of the superior of Motsameta Monastery, Father Tornike, and of Father Zenon, painter of icons.

  The author thanks the Biological Station of the Zoology Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, in what used to be East Prussia; Mr. Badz Zantaria, of Tamysh, Abkhazia; the Kulturreferat of Munich; and the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, for making it possible to write this work.

  The author thanks Rosemarie Tietze and Susan Brownsberger for their endless patience and valued suggestions.

  The author thanks as well his friends and comrades for the friendship, generosity, and tolerance shown to him in various periods of his life as he and they gained shared experience: poet Gleb Gorbovsky; writer and poet Yuz Aleshkovsky; artist, sculptor, writer, playwright, and director Rezo Gabriadze; architect and artist A. A. Velikanov; artist B. A. Messerer; and especially Bella Akhmadulina and the great singer Victoria Ivanova; as well as Dr. V. R. Dolnik, professor of biological sciences; writer and traveler G. Y. Snegirev; poet and singer S. G. Saltykov; writer Leonid Gabyshev; art critic Andrei Eldarov; artist and restorer Sergei Bogoslovsky; physicist Ruslan Jopua; writer Daur Zantaria; world record holder Marlen Papava; and many, many others.

  L. Gabriadze

  THE FIRST TALE

  Birds (Catechesis)

  Two men went up into the temple …

  —LUKE 18:10

  “He said” or “I thought”?

  I wouldn’t want to find that this had style.

  That is, I wouldn’t want{1}

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  instead of what I’d like to tell you.

  . . . .

  Moreover

  . . . . . . .

  in what I plan to say.

  We live on the floor of the air-ocean.{2} Among houses and trees as if among mussels and seaweed. Here comes the crab, his bottom shell scraping the asphalt, his armor-clad neck immobile; only by accident, as he crawls over circumstances in his way, will he look up—there above is the splashing sky, and suspended in it, barely moving her fins, is a bird. Birds are the fish of our ocean.

  We live on the border of two habitats. This is basic. We are neither one thing nor the other. Only birds and fish know what it means to have one habitat. They don’t know this, of course. They belong. I doubt that man would meditate, either, if he flew or swam. To meditate, one needs a contradiction that does not exist in a homogeneous habitat—the tension of the border.

  There is constant conflict and incident on this border. We are tense. We relax only in our sleep, in a kind of scavenged safety, as if under a stone. Sleep is our way of swimming, our only way of flying. Behold how heavily man treads the earth …

  As if in pain. Perhaps the asphalt underfoot is too hard, or his shoes are too tight, or his workday is too long, or his shopping bags weigh down his arms. That is how he walks.

  “Behold the fowls of the air …

  “ … they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

  “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

  “But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

  “Fear ye not, therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.”

  Fear ye not … It’s easy to say.

  In some sense, I fear, that text states all we know about birds.

  Birds are strangely absent in our lives, although unquestionably visible to the naked eye. They seem to fly at the periphery of our consciousness, as if painted on the very inside of the bell jar with which we have capped the inhabited world. Naive as such concepts now seem, the heavenly canopy is in fact the precise inner boundary of our knowledge, although it was once declared the outer. This opaque bell jar, which we carry with us, wobbles faintly at our every step. The birds fly always at the rim of it, and we cannot draw near to them—there is a curvature out there, a bend, a slip …

  So birds exist and do not exist. After all, by nature we watch our feet. Looking up is a luxury. From Aristophanes to Hitchcock, it’s not birds that exist but the concepts to which they give rise. We can examine a bird only when it’s dead. We can shoot and eat one. But there’s no contact. This is the same as with the heavenly canopy: we know by now that the sky doesn’t end there, but for everyday life the earth remains flat, and visibility is capped by our sphere of experience, as if by a lid.

  I will venture to assert that we have less contact (in the physical sense) with birds than with any other living creatures. It’s hard to imagine that you have touched and caressed one, or that one has pecked you. They just fly around. We have much more experience of direct contact with the more remote groups of creatures diminished by the perspective of evolution—with flies, let’s say. The airplane still doesn’t make us think of a bird, but the helicopter looks disgustingly like a dragonfly. Hitchcock spent his childhood in a taxidermist’s shop—birds pecked not in self-defense but on the attack. In art, the bird is a naturally surrealistic creature.

  I was here on the Kurish Spit, at the biological research station, for the seventh time. Or maybe it wasn’t the seventh, but seven makes a round number … I had first fled to this place from 1968, as if to a foreign country. “But this s
hore had already been won{3} … ” Since then … There’s no getting used to it. Each time, I’m surprised by what I see here again. Supposedly, the reason I come here each time is that I’ve forever remembered what a unique place it is on this earth, and how resurrectingly wholesome it is, making no threats and imposing no demands, existing so independently of you that it doesn’t even reject you—that is, the kind of place where, in the marvelous words of Olga S., “soul is miscible with body in all proportions.” That feeling is probably first love, even though expressed in the language of chemistry … Supposedly, that’s the reason I come—and each time, I forget the reason. Suddenly I’m here. This place recalls a homeland I have never seen.

  Little cannon-smoke clouds were drifting across the sky.

  Who had been shooting? The smoke had forgotten the shot; the artilleryman, his cannon. The little clouds were in pairs, like the cheeks of babes who had slid down from the laps of Madonnas to play. The trees, however, were somewhat confused about the wind in relation to which they grew. Some of them were especially submissive to it and grew away from the sea at a forty-five-degree angle. That angle then represented the constancy of the winds, as graphically as a textbook illustration …

  (The mention of the textbook is very much to the point. For, after my grade school course in “non-living nature,” I would never again see the ideal ravines, hills, and steppes of those illustrations … but would perpetually experience the torture of growing up, when everything proves to be not quite as portrayed: not so pure, not so exact, not so expressive of the word that names it—not a ravine but a type of ravine, not a forest but a type of forest, neither fish nor fowl, neither the word “ravine” nor the word “grove.” But here everything remained in that very state: sea, dunes, clouds, bushes, sand, wind. This unconditionality turned out to have two odd conditions; more on this a little later … )

  … But after smashing against the dunes the wind blew in all directions. The trees, bred to the habit and memory of the line of least resistance, became confused and didn’t know what direction to grow in, began growing every which way. They hindered the wind more than they submitted, and thereby altered their assignment. They formed a tangle of live windfalls, growing crisscross, like an anti-tank barrier—x’s and y’s in all directions—the equation was unsolved.

  The bus stopped, and I got off.

  First of all I should see Doctor D.

  I was allowed to sit in the corner.

  In front of me sat six pairs of students, the backs of their heads unintelligent.

  He paced the classroom with his hands folded behind him, back and forth past the blackboard. His manner of walking made him somewhat taller and thinner than he really was. He picked his feet up slightly too high and bobbed his head slightly forward at every step, peering as if his eye were placed at the side, like a bird’s, and because of this his profile dominated his appearance. He would wheel about so swiftly that he was again presented in profile. As if running along the top of a picket fence. At last he stopped running, faced the blackboard, and drew a straight line. The sound of the chalk seemed to lag behind …

  “Let’s take … ” he said, with that lagging screek (which, despite years of lessonless freedom, I instantly remembered with my whole hide), “let’s take”—screek, screek, screek, he drew a square—“a closed space.”

  And he gave us that same sidelong look, as if he had won.

  Not a spark of recognition did he read in the gaze of his audience. He retracted the animation of his own gaze, as if retracting his head into his shoulders.

  “Which is to say,” he continued dryly, “a space bounded on all sides. Hermetically sealed. No access. Nothing in it.”

  The square on the blackboard became slightly emptier than before. It gave off a whiff of loneliness.

  “And let’s put a bird in it.”

  From the severity with which he had drawn the square, I had thought him capable only of straight lines, and now suddenly, with vivacity and ease, in one flourish, he drew a little bird in the corner—in profile, naturally. A girl in the front row giggled.

  That was the first assumption. The assumption, as everyone knows, is what the theory rests on. It was also the first oversight. How could the poor bird have gotten in?

  “What does she need first of all, in order to continue to exist?” He waited a moment, to awaken the idea in his audience, and gave the answer himself: “Air.”

  So saying, he erased a little window, with his finger, in the upper part of the square. Everyone sighed—as if the air had whistled into it. The little bird was saved.

  “What next?”

  And he added a tiny cup of water.

  Thus he furnished the bird with everything essential, and the array became appallingly large and elaborate. He anticipated her needs like a young Creator. They were endless. By now the blackboard was covered with formulas somewhat more complex than the 02 and H20 with which all had begun, though not yet sufficiently complex to look like the modern idea of science. The bird, however, already felt cramped in the space allotted to her: she was overgrown with paraphernalia and family. Yet this was the only spot where she could still so much as perch, because the entire space that the lecturer had furnished for her to live in (so empty and small to begin with, on the huge empty blackboard) was now pinched, squeezed, hemmed in on all sides by formulas for her existence; the area outside it was developing the negative pressure of an insufficient knowledge of life … and by now the joyous biblical beginning—air, water, food—had been left somewhere far behind. Science begins with that which is truly complex and impossible to grasp—the beginning—but abandons it somewhere at the bottom of grade school in the form of axioms and lemmas, and ends with merely that which can be learned by any Ph.D.

  But it’s a long while since anyone has begun at the beginning. To succeed in a narrow major specialty, you must not hesitate to begin with its furthest possible continuation. I was moved by the attempt, in this lecture, to seek meaning. The lecturer himself seemed to be surprised, and to find something for himself in this rare opportunity. Specialists are inclined to suspect everyone of an interest in their own subject (the “fascination” device, long ago exhausted in novels about science)—their neurosis has a touching, pathetic nakedness. And while the men students aren’t listening to him, and the women students are mechanically writing, and I’m reflecting on his resemblance (a flattering one, from his point of view) to the subject of his study (in the banal sense that owners resemble their dogs); while we’re distracted and not listening to him, he inconspicuously crosses the border of the popular, the well known, the obvious, whose veil he was just about to lift, and enters the domain of special knowledge, the specialist’s private shell, the ecological niche of ecology itself—and by now we aren’t listening to him, not because we’re distracted, but because we no longer understand, for we have missed, once again, the long-dreamt-of giddiness of crossing from the perceptively visible to the mentally graspable. We aren’t listening to him … a convenient transition to a new thread of the narrative.

  I could have heard and understood this as far back as grade school. How strange that humankind did not understand some of it along with me, a little schoolboy! I had finished that school, had even finished college on my second attempt, I was well past thirty before people started talking about the things that surround us and have always surrounded us—about nature, about the things we can’t live without—about air, water, and food. So what else was new? But it did turn out to be new. The conversation itself turned out to be new. Nowadays it’s so faddish that it seems recited by rote, as if even the danger of having nothing left to breathe weren’t really a danger: “They put a scare into us, but tomorrow, and the day after, we’re still breathing!” Tragedy has degenerated into loose talk, a way of leaving everything as it was. And suddenly we have the dreadful thought that it may be more promising to ban a subject than to talk it to death after the ban is lifted. Ours was a hungry era at first, we were
in no mood for it, and suddenly we’ve eaten our fill, we’re alive, food is not vital.

  Time passes, and unrelated things begin to fall into line … After the war, fish multiplied in the lakes and streams; the forests were untrampled, mushroom-rich, berry-laden; Father and I went bicycling and encountered no traffic, not a soul. Empty sandy roads and the twitter of birds. In what year did everyone start going down to the dacha, everyone start taking mushroom and berry walks, everyone start fishing? It happened gradually, of course, but also suddenly … I remember it by the suburban trains, the way they were suddenly overcrowded, packed—suddenly one year. We needed to live through the ten years after the war before we could stop eating the essential second plate of soup and thinking of taxis as decadence, and suddenly one year we all started going to the country—was it ’55? ’56? Why, it had always been all right to go to the country, no one forbade it—but suddenly it had become all right. To shoulder a wonderful little box and go ice fishing.

  This happened in Russia, this I observed, but over in the West, where we hadn’t been, which we were reading about, it was all idiosyncrasies, eccentricities, high living: someone didn’t eat for six months, someone ate a car, someone crossed the ocean without food or water on a rubber raft, someone crawled into caves, someone into a crater, someone walked all the way across Germany on his hands, someone finally climbed Everest, someone set sail without rudder or sails.

  But earlier, too … yes, a little earlier, if it hadn’t been for the war … The North and South Poles, the balloons, the dirigibles, ever higher and higher—it had happened earlier, too, this peculiar cocktail of adventure, sport, and science, but for some reason especially after the war. When something became understandable, when we all understood something—understood something, but didn’t understand what. And that “what” began to slip away, irretrievably. Time, too, is a living being; it, too, wants to live its life. Every so often there comes a time when humankind lives as one person: in some sense, this is indeed a Time. We grow old together, rejoice together, understand together. Later we don’t understand what has become of all this, where it has disappeared to. Someone realizes that the state of commonality is over, lost, beyond return, someone senses it before the rest—there is a wave of suicides, someone casts off in the emptying boat to overtake the romantically colored ideals. But that movement, too, left strange things in general use: flippers, masks, large beads, the vogue for sweaters and jeans, new forms of sport like archery and waterskiing. Some people began to tame lions, or to live among wolves or monkeys, some people began to do time studies on Stone Age work processes, after fabricating tools on Stone Age models and withdrawing from civilization (in all such exercises one is troubled by the small two-way radio in the plastic bag, and the possibility of heavenly rescue by helicopter—the umbilical cord compromises any escape). Strange people. Their behavior was puzzling. They might be suspected of publicity seeking. But your suspicion was tinged with envy: He’s broken out! Here we are, shoulder to the yoke, and he sets off to hike around the world—anyone would be glad to do the same. The strange part is that there were only a handful of these eccentrics. To earn the right, they had to be surprising. But to surprise this work-worn, stifled world is hard. In the adventures that become famous, you are struck by just one thing—their simplicity. Why didn’t anyone ever think of this before? It makes you envious. You, too, could have done it. And somehow you see all too clearly that you can no longer follow. The gap, the breach, is already cemented over and guarded. This world is hard to surprise. As the poet wrote: “It’s not easily surprised by your words, not impressed by the look on your face … ” Yet we may well be surprised by the things that do impress this world, how simple they always are, how seemingly obvious, within reach of anyone. So here we are, living in a world more impressed by natural behavior than by the formula mc2. I maintain that this shift, rather than the long list of naturalists of all centuries, constitutes the essential history of the science of ecology.