Authors: Andrei Bitov
“When you’re doing restorations,” I said, fearful of asking an imprecise question, “do you also
…
make
…
contact?”
“Of course,” he said, standing the panel against the wall at precisely that moment. “But it’s different. However good the icon, even if ‘not made by human hands,’ it was painted by a man. Unlike Creation itself. Out there I’m in contact with the Creator.” He said this as lightly as if boarding a streetcar or entering an office. “In here, with a man’s faith, sometimes true, sometimes not. Sometimes”—and now he became thoughtful—“even with my own faith.”
Order had been restored, in the sense that no vestiges remained. We passed behind the bin and through a small door leading nowhere. The doomed, human sigh of the Great Dane, whom we left behind, echoed at our backs in a new darkness.
We were plunged into the depths of the Middle Ages. The depths were literal, stony, and cramped. Or had I grown considerably broader in the shoulders, and taller? My shoulders scraped the walls, my head counted the invisible beams. Climbing a steep little staircase, I suddenly saw above me a star. The fresh night air burst into my cellar lungs. We found ourselves on top of the wall that surrounded the citadel. Standing on it, one could especially appreciate its thickness. We paused there, emphatically breathing in and out. This was a boundary. On one side all was silent, coalescing in the night. The monastery buildings, invisible, huddled there rubbing their plump white flanks together and breathing—only the peaked bell tower could still be made out. On the other side, chains of streetlamps extended into the distance, a car honked, windows glowed at regular intervals in the hulking orderliness of the adjacent neighborhood
…
The gulp of air was like a genial glass.
This platform called for a speech addressed to nowhere. Pavel Petrovich took the floor.
“And behold, He created him
…
” Pavel Petrovich glanced to the left and then began gazing to the right: the dark of the monastery and the light of the new development. “He created the landscape and added man
…
Ayvazovsky’s mistake! You know something funny? In this case, too, He may not have been the one who added the man, eh?”
“So who did?” I looked to the right and left.
“It’s a secret for now,” Pavel Petrovich said, his slyness gleaming in the night. “My secret. Or rather, a guess, a hint
…
I’ll tell you. But not right away.”
“I understand,” I said, or perhaps nodded. More likely nodded.
“What you understand doesn’t matter, what matters is that you’ll understand later,” he said rather ominously. “Judge for yourself. The world was completely ready when man appeared in it. Man created nothing in it. He didn’t make the landscape. What he did make he made badly, he spoiled. You’ll say that telegraph poles, rails, and airplanes became part of the landscape long ago. Precisely:
became
! The wild animal carries a bullet under his skin—and never mind, he lives, with a slight limp. Man didn’t create the landscape, but neither did he create the conflagration. Again, neither the desert nor the ashes are the work of his hands, they merely exist where he is. Not by him are the weeds sown, not by him is the sand whipped into dunes. The unity he has destroyed in the landscape is merely a breach through which that unity’s laws, which he did not establish, can operate. The surgeon cuts, but who will heal the wound, clot the blood, leave the scar? Who leaves the scar on God’s Creation? You will say man—and you will be a thousand times wrong. Man inflicts the wound, the scar is from God. Man!” he howled. “The only word that means nothing!”
“I beg your pardon? But then—”
“Is there anything in this world that can name itself?”
“Why, no,” I faltered.
“There’s our word! ‘Whyno.’ What’s wrong with that as a name for man? Does the moon somehow name itself? Does the pine? Does the cow say, ‘I am a cow’? They have no language, you will claim. But life, existence—are they not language, are they not expression? We are given the language of words so that we may name everything. The stone cannot say of itself that it’s a stone, but we will speak for it. And who will speak for us?
…
‘I,’ said Adam after the Fall; ‘thou,’ said Cain to Abel; ‘he,’ said his descendant, of another descendant; ‘I am he,’ Christ reminded us all. But where is the word ‘man’ here? Man is but a pronoun: I, thou, he, they, and finally we. And if he’s not a pronoun but man, and with a capital besides, this crown of Creation, climax of evolution, this navel of the earth—then he’s merely the agent of erosion, corrosion, putrefaction, every kind of oxidation
…
The stress of nature.”
But art? I wanted to say.
“What of art
…
?” He waved a hand. “Man didn’t create art, either. Although this is a uniquely permissible way of stretching the point in order to call him a creator or founder, if only with a small letter. What does art prove? That the highest creation of human hands has consumed almost no material. What has been spent on canvas, paint, paper, and ink? For this, nature suffices in abundance. For engendering yet another nature.”
Pavel Petrovich was terrible and beautiful. As though he stood on a mountain.
“And you know what?
Do you know what?
Creative work doesn’t even require any
time
! Man does not know time when he creates
…
When he loves
…
” He sighed. “In the face of death, he will discover that he has destroyed all his remaining time—that is, consumed it, that is, he’s destroyed
himself
, and now he’s dead. Time!” he howled. “Who are you? Are you man, perhaps? Is man, perhaps, a sort of larva, vermin, a landscape moth? Time’s larva, death’s chrysalis? The way the pharaohs were bandaged? Isn’t that true, that they lie like chrysalises? The pyramids are monuments to death
…
All attempts to immortalize, to endure beyond the brackets of time, will prove monuments to death. Fear is already a cult. Everything here will outlive me, you see. ‘Everything, even the dilapidated birdhouses
…
’
{21}
We are indulgent toward the landscape, but only toward the kind that’s mortal, along with us—the birdhouses, too, will fall apart soon enough, catching up with us
…
What we don’t like is worms. Worms. Oh my God, the worms, oh my God, the worms
…
” he muttered. “It’s beginning
…
” he said darkly.
“What’s beginning?”
“Time, damn it! Vodka ends—time begins. They flow across. No gap there. Same thing. Time flows, too. The language—the language says it all. Now to open this crypt
…
”
Soundlessly, powerfully, a rancid slice of moon broke through a dark cloud. Pavel Petrovich’s eyes blazed toward the moon with a matching light. All unexpectedly, he was dead drunk. With a last, heroic effort he shook himself out of his lethargy. A convulsive shudder ran over his whole body, articulating its disjunct, molten, and fused parts.
“Let’s go!” he said decisively, and started to descend as if a trapdoor had opened under him.
There were steep steps in front of him, it turned out, and they led into the thickness of the wall. By now, only his head remained above, once more illuminated by the moon, whose smell was fading; the head turned to me, its general shape reminiscent of
…
The black ball lay abandoned on top of the wall, John the Baptist’s head never did roll off the charger
…
The head summoned, and I had no strength to move, no strength to follow him
…
I glanced about for the last time. At my right, asleep forever, was the monastery. At my left, glass and concrete, the city of the future smoldered in life’s embrace, the last charred brand of a universal bonfire
…
The moon burst into laughter again. Stirring ominously, like dead men come to life, the monastery buildings closed in
…
I turned my head one last time in the fresh air and disappeared underground. One last star flashed above me, as if it had fallen.
“Careful!” came Pavel Petrovich’s caressing voice. “Give me your hand
…
Here’s my hand!” His hand proved unexpectedly alive, strong, and warm. “That’s the way. We’ll be there in a minute.”
We moved through this catacomb with increasing confidence. There was even something life-affirming and optimistic in our progress, as though there might be light ahead.
“Well, what’s so disagreeable about a worm?” His voice, accompanying me, sounded confident and sober again. “Why isn’t a spider pretty? But man dislikes, sees as unaesthetic, finds especially ugly the very things that will outlive him. Outlive not the individual, actually, but outlive man himself, outlive his very species
…
The reminder makes him wince. Weeds, barren ground, cockroaches, flies. They tell him over and over: You will not be, you will not be!
…
Pah, they’ve blocked it up.”
Here I bumped into Pavel Petrovich, because he, in turn, had collided with something. This was a dead end. And it was
dark
! I raised my outspread hand to my eyes—and couldn’t see it.
“We’re here!” Even his voice became more cheerful.
Is he going to do me in, or what? I thought, equally cheerfully, and at the same time touched my useless eye. My eyelashes twitched under my hand with independent life: I was utterly unafraid, but a voluptuous wave of affection for my independent, self-contained existence ran down my spine
…
Pavel Petrovich kicked the obstacle, and it gave forth a joyful, booming response.
“Semyo-o-on! Simyo-o-on!” he shouted, drumming.
It was a door. What more could it lead to?
“Co-o-ming!” an unfriendly voice said at last, from the other side.
I thought I heard a sigh of relief from Pavel Petrovich: Thank God.
“Who’s there?” My voice sounded scared, which surprised and wounded me.
“Oh, that’s
…
” Pavel Petrovich shifted impatiently from foot to foot. “A great man
…
Head and shoulders above us. A sage!”
“But who is he?” I insisted.
“Semyon? Just
…
a hermit.”
“Well!” This was fabulous! “Is he Semyon or Simyon?”
{22}
“I don’t know for sure. We’ll ask him in a minute.” Pavel Petrovich pounded on the door again. As if someone had been standing behind it all this time, a bolt clanked, a hook rattled, tin squealed, a sharp blade of light slashed from the crack.
The blinding fifteen-watt bulb illumined a white rat on a man’s shoulder. Simyon was a tall, crudely hinged peasant. His long, taciturn face—now the jaw, now the forehead—stuck out beyond the picture frame; he wore a smeared apron and smelled of paint. Pavel Petrovich took the wordless peasant’s elbow and drew him deep inside, leaving me to look around. The cellar was extensive, its far end hidden in darkness. Down the middle, in two rows, huge barrels had been set in cement and covered with heavy lids. The complex and powerful aroma of acid and of briny dankness (as if a sea had died here) did not fit with the paint smell trailing from Simyon. The two men went through yet another small door, where a truly brilliant light blazed. Simyon, brightly lit, glanced at me over the rat, as though verifying something Pavel Petrovich had whispered to him, and they both disappeared.
I stood for a long time. They had forgotten about me. Or perhaps abandoned me?
…
At last I risked peeking in. They turned around as if caught, with suspiciously sober faces. In Pavel Petrovich’s hands was an extraordinarily fresh, bright icon; he seemed to be turning it this way and that. Simyon’s hands were otherwise occupied: in the right he held a small brush, in the left a gleaming half liter. Little tubes and bottles were clustered in working disarray on a small workbench, under a strong lamp, and the whole room was about the size of a barrel, which we wholly filled. Separately, on the only chair, stood yet another icon, which proved to be the very same Saviour with whom we had drunk. How had it come here? I hadn’t noticed Pavel Petrovich carrying anything in his hands.
“Familiar?” he asked.
I nodded. But that wasn’t what he meant, as it happened.
“St. Cyril and St. Methodius,”
{23}
he said, turning a fresh icon toward me.
“This is St. Cyril?” I asked, pointing in confusion.
Pavel Petrovich grinned. “You guessed it.”
I wanted to ask Simyon how it happened that he, too, was a restorer, but Simyon picked up two glasses and nodded to us to follow him.
Nothing surprised me anymore—I was spellbound. Simyon set the bottle and glasses on a barrel. Leaning hard, he shoved the lid off the adjacent barrel. Out of nowhere a small scoop or dipper appeared in his hand, and he dipped it into the barrel. Pickled cucumbers, no less, splashed in the dipper like small fish. He emptied the dipper onto the lid, and they poured glossily down in a picturesque little heap.
“If only we had some cymbals,” Pavel Petrovich said, rather voluptuously.
“They’re gone.” These were the first words I had heard from Simyon.
“What about from the bottom?”
Simyon said nothing. He cocked his head to one side, as before, and seemed to study me.
“I’ll go after them myself,” Pavel Petrovich begged.
Reluctantly Simyon consented, and Pavel Petrovich headed for the third barrel. Its lid was off, and he began to rummage with the dipper, leaning down into the barrel the way he had recently rummaged in the bin—as though the barrel, too, held another bottle.
“Hold my legs a minute,” we heard from the barrel.
Simyon did not stir, and I was the one who went to hold his legs.
“Pull!” he shouted at last, in the echoing barrel. And there he stood, red-faced and triumphant, holding two cymlin squash. Brine dripped from his hands.