The Monkey Link (10 page)

Dethroned, we returned home and climbed the dune. The sun popped up from the sea for an instant, only to plunge back down. The sand lay pink on the dune top. A long velvet shadow fell on the slope concavely, inside out. Night, awakening, was stirring in the gully between the dunes.

“I would never have believed that Malthus lived in the eighteenth century,” I sighed. “Carriages, groves, string quartets, gowns with trains
 
…
Air
 
…
what air they must have had then
 
…
Little streams babbling
 
…
the bumblebee buzzing
 
…
shepherds and shepherdesses, the reed
 
…
but he wrapped himself in his gloomy cloak and swayed in his carriage, thinking his black and distant thought, unbidden by anything around him
 
…
 
”

“Don’t you think it’s strange,” the doctor said, “that we’ve spent the whole evening talking, right here in primeval nature, without meeting a single person—and what have we talked about?”

“Yes, what a place for it! We sin, we sin!” I laughed, grateful to him for that “we.” In my hand was the Swedish beer crate, attesting my intention to live.

Hardly had the sun made its final departure into the sea when opposite to it, on the gulf side, without waiting for dusk, the moon burst out from behind the sand dune—as if our two heavenly bodies were seesawing on the Spit, with their invisible plank laid right across it
 
…
The moon’s face was green. Goodness knows what she had seen, there at home, before coming out to us.

Probably it was she who made me toss and turn so, unable to sleep: her frightened light was beating in through all the cracks. I sat up and looked out the window. Small storm clouds were racing across the moon’s already melancholy brow. She disappeared for a second, hidden by a thick cloud, only to pop out with an even more venomous flush. “The moon went behind a cloud”—I repeated the tranquil phrase to myself and was seized with laughter. The moon never went behind any cloud! I mean, just picture where the cloud is, where I am, where the moon is. It would be hard to give a more laughable example of distorted scale! “The sun hid behind the hill
 
…
 
” Why should it suddenly make me giggle like this?
 
…

Now I saw the true self-sufficiency of the sun, which, if you please, “will send us its light,” “its fiery greeting.”
{10}
Hogwash, I thought. There’s no way the sun is concerned with that. It doesn’t send anything to
us.
It’s wholly concerned with itself. Little does it care what we are, what kind of dust drifting past
 
…
The single nail by which hung our whole earthly life began to wobble loose in my mind. Man’s arrogance and insolence were first fully expressed in language, if only in these simple forms. Man somehow feels that everything he uses is directly related to him. But that is truly laughable. “Nature’s storeroom,” “natural riches,” “the conquest of nature,” “black gold,” “white gold,” and whatever other kind of gold
 
…
I sorted through this fresh evidence of man’s banditry, all the prints his unwashed fingers had left in the language. I was lying on my back, and my face was grinning separately and complacently—flooded, if you please, with moonlight
 
…

I was wakened by a heavy thunderclap splitting directly above me, practically in my own head. In the pitch dark, it was so sudden that I didn’t realize or remember where I was, what was happening to me—or even who I was. A living thing, capable of feeling fear and not wishing to die, had awakened in terror; it did not know that it was I. Following the crash and vibration, as if grabbing me by the throat, came a total, black silence, in which there was nothing but prolonged terror and strangulation. A blinding white light rang out, illuminating the matchbox in which I slept—and me, kneeling on all fours on the bed. I truly thought I saw my own self, my body, as if I had abandoned it, still a short distance away, in a quandary whether to return or not. Immediately afterward a blow slammed on the roof. The roof grunted, but strangely enough it held, yielding and moaning a little under the solid stream of water flooding down on it. In this swish and roar a new light rang out, this time reddish as it penetrated the layer of water coursing down the pane, and again everything stood still in utter blackness and the steady drone of the flood. Now the next thunderclap struck, so close that it seemed, again, to be inside my skull. I was wide-eyed awake, but that only increased my fright. And then the lightning began blazing and flaring with such frequency that from one flash to the next I never saw the light fade—my hut was enveloped in pink and white flame. By this light I could make out the map over my bed: all the little veins of rivers and railroads, and the little circles for cities. A flash—and I read the meaningless word “Amsterdam.”
{11}
No such city anymore, I thought indifferently, Holland is already washed away
 
…
I’m not sure whether I had any clear idea what might be happening—the deluge, a collision with a comet, an atomic bomb explosion, the atmosphere was tearing off, or I was going crazy—but one thing was clear to me: this was
the end.
“The living end!” I said aloud, to give myself courage, but gallows humor did not rescue me. I didn’t know what people usually did in a situation as unique as the end of the world. Again, one thing became clear to me: not for anything did I want to die right here, on this bed and in this cabin. Moaning with terror, still on all fours, I crawled off the bed and butted the door open with my forehead. This was right, to have crawled out on my hands and knees. The downpour was like a wall, and in any other posture I wouldn’t have been able to breathe. Out here it was even brighter than in the house, the water sparkled like cut glass. Because of the black trunks of the pine trees, I could tell where the light was coming from. Now I wouldn’t die in that house! One thing had been accomplished. But I didn’t want to die among these close little pines, either. I started to crawl toward the light, efficiently, aiming for open space. Swiftly, on all fours, I ran like an animal, leaving my new track in the wet sand. In this manner I made it to an open spot at the foot of the dunes. Ahead of me, over the gulf, rose a fiery, pulsing wall. It was red and yellow. A roar mightier than cannon fire enveloped me on all sides. I halted, spellbound by the spectacle of this dense, oscillating, thundering curtain. I had no more answers, I didn’t know what to do next, and I started to cry. I was choking on the downpour, but I imagined I was shedding that many tears. I did not want to die. And it wasn’t that I had such a great desire to live at this moment, or didn’t want to die in this manner—I didn’t want to die
as this person.
I was unprepared. In desperation I crawled slightly higher up the dune, as if dragging my bundle of tattered, unexpiated sins behind me like immovable property: the unwritten letter to my mother, the puppy I had never given my daughter, the shame of today’s verbosity
 
…
I don’t know why the sins I recalled were so few and innocent. I was sincerely ready to repent of everything. Most likely I wanted, unconsciously, to depart with a better opinion of myself. I had no intention of duping the Most High.

Greatest and most shameful, drowning out all these trivia, was the sin of my unreadiness to stand before Him. I lifted up to Him a bleating, wordless prayer and crossed myself. This astounded and even sobered me. I realized, with a sensation of certainty, that I had done it correctly. But before
 
…
I well remember that I had never really known how to cross myself: left to right? right to left? how to begin, vertically or horizontally? navel last or second? how many fingers to use? My attitude toward the church was the respectful one of a catechumen
{12}
—and yet I could never cross myself in church, not only because I didn’t seem to have sufficient excuse or reason to do so, but also because I didn’t properly know how. Trying to learn, I had cast sidelong glances at the people praying, but either they crossed themselves so small and so often, or
 
…
In sum, well remembering my perpetual puzzlement on this issue, I knelt at the foot of the dune, before the fiery wall as before the Coming, I was so childishly glad to have managed it all! And so adeptly did I genuflect, so devoutly did I cross myself, that my terror left me. Fear, the scourge of humanity, was washed from me by the water. And I don’t remember anything more
 
…

I didn’t remember when I woke up, either. I walked out into the early morning. The sun was shining. Droplets sparkled on the twigs. Steam was rising from the grass. The bird kingdom was chirping even more furiously than usual. An ant was dragging a fly carcass. Associate N. was hauling cages down from the attic.

Everything was in its place—paradise, as before. Except that the sky seemed even bluer, the sand even yellower. Nevertheless, the morning struck me as insincere: it was pretending to be morning. I sought signs of betrayal and found none. The morning was pretending not to remember, mocking a jealous man. With a wry grin I tried to put up my fingers and cross myself the same way, correctly. My hand would not rise. As before, I didn’t remember how. Proverbially: “The peasant will not cross himself until the thunder sounds.” At least this joy had not betrayed me, the joy of being overwhelmed, yet again, by the exactitude of language. The somber doctor walked past me with a shaving brush in his hand, then came back.

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation all night,” he said. “The thought occurred to me that there is nothing poorer than a rich imagination. It hypnotizes its possessor with the brilliance of its very first picture—the most banal and primitive, as a rule. In the same way, the pessimistic eye naturally sees a more convincing view. We cannot be sure of any far-reaching causes or effects on the basis of our own experience; we won’t live to see the results of our experiment in the course of our one life
 
…
Such is man’s time span—unequal to either history or life. Yet another basis for pessimism. Its other eye. To an honest young man my optimism may seem unconvincing, labored, self-serving
 
…
But throughout this game we always have a gambit in reserve, which we haven’t been taking into account. Give it any name you wish: our ignorance, or the will of the Most High. Yesterday you called man a parasite found in the earth’s ‘safety margin’ (your words or mine?), as if in her skin. I came close to agreeing with you. It may all be true, but none of us can evaluate—not hypothetically, not imaginatively, but practically—the size of that margin. It’s like fortune-telling. Yes, a trip, yes, a government house, and of course a woman. But when? The time is not named. Until the temporal coordinate is defined we may hypothesize whatever we like. Anything will fit. And if we can’t determine the ‘safety’ coefficient, we can’t determine the role of either man or progress. To the same extent that we can hypothesize that man won’t stop, that he’ll take the ax of progress and lop off the bough he’s sitting on—to an equal degree, we can hypothesize the opposite
 
…
Since our earth is still large and sufficient for life, isn’t our consciousness that she’s catastrophically diminished (by instant communications, information technology, and so forth), and likewise our consciousness that she’s appallingly denuded and ravaged, merely a form of defense for her? A warning sign, a signal, switched on far ahead of irreversible danger, so that we’ll have time to take heed
 
…
Which is to say, I believe that the speed with which we conceptualize the danger is out of proportion to the earth’s real situation. And this, then, to use your terminology, is man’s ‘safety margin’: the guarantee that he will have time to learn from his visual aid, progress. That is, the acceleration of progress isn’t excessively great, it’s
sufficiently
great, just so that we’ll have time before the catastrophe. Perhaps quite soon there’ll be a graduating class, the end of man’s high school education
 
…
the setting-up of the experiment in the school laboratory, a false explosion
 
…
sparks in the physics lab, a stink from the chemistry classroom—no more.”

For some reason I felt offended. Offended that he had shot ahead to be the first to speak my words. Offended that I was “young” (even though “honest”). Who was he, to play the old man! Two years younger than I. And then suddenly, as we turned back, our idea hit me. The idea that our conceptualization of reality might prove swifter than reality, and that this was our guarantee, this high reaction rate
 
…
The idea struck me as new, despite its affirmation of life. Practical experience made me grin wryly. Wasn’t I a witness that people don’t learn anything! Even if you bash them on the head
 
…
But “we always have a gambit in reserve,” he had said. I liked that gambit.

The morning was delightful. If it was indeed pretending, the pretense was even better than the real thing
 
…
I walked out to the trap. Its nets, still wet and heavy, sagged in steep curves. In the narrowest part of it there was a kind of final receptacle, where the feathered prisoners languished. There weren’t very many. Two or three sparrowlike birds
 
…
Suddenly I heard a laugh, a rather odd one, unfamiliar but distinct. As though an old man had come up behind me, unshaven, husky from smoking, and just a touch crazy
 
…
Where could he have come from? I turned and saw
 
…
No one. I felt impelled to shrug my shoulders, just in case. Then, from the same spot, the same old man let out a distinct, teasing caw. I glanced back angrily and caught sight of Clara. She had taken a convenient, spacious perch, on a bough neither thick nor thin, and was comfortably observing the trap and me. When she saw that I had caught sight of her, she behaved more than oddly. She burst into avid, screeching caws—these were what I had earlier, absurdly, associated with laughter. She choked, capsized on the branch, and swung upside down, croaking softly. Nimbly righting herself, she again broke into violent caws, flapping her wings in delight and stepping impatiently, but with no intention of taking off. I inspected myself. How could I have provoked her to such behavior? This was absurd, it wasn’t I who
 
…
I followed her gaze more attentively and only then saw the large bird darting around in the middle of the trap. Goodness knows what it was—it darted so swiftly—an owl, a jay, a cuckoo? not a magpie
 
…
a bird as big as Clara. It had landed in the trap, thrashed around in search of the exit, and inevitably bumped into the net. Recoiling, it had descended deeper, closer to the final receptacle, beside which Clara and I were watching. The captive still was closer to the exit than to this end, and the exit was wide open, in contrast to the swiftly narrowing throat of the trap, yet however much the bird resisted, it only moved deeper. Strange, I thought; right now, you know, you could fly out more easily than in
 
…
Clara was cawing with might and main. And this wasn’t sympathy or a summons. As before, it sounded like laughter. She kept capsizing, swinging upside down—“Oh, you’re killing me!”—and again choking ecstatically and happily, as if with laughter. Suddenly I realized that this really was laughter. No doubt about it. I remembered asking the doctor whether animals had a sense of humor
 
…
Now I had my answer. Clara thought this was unbearably funny: a bird as big as she was had landed in the trap. As I’ve already mentioned, this happens rather rarely—large birds are smarter and understand the trap. Of course there was also a shade of cruelty, a despicable triumph (“Not me!”) in Clara’s laughter. But indeed it was laughter. “What a fool! Ca-aw!” laughed Clara. “So big! Caw, caw!
Such
a fool! Ca-a-aw
 
…
 
” She may even have been so astounded by the bird’s stupidity that she felt no personal triumph. “You
fool
!”