The Monkey Link (23 page)

This, however, was what I needed the white trousers for! (“No vow is forever”—but I didn’t think that one would prove so shortlived.) White trousers! I needed them in order to walk with my arms around my friends and catch the glow of my own self-delight on the faces of passersby. In exactly this state of mind (was it fate, the plot, the laws of symmetry, or simply a mirror image?) we might encounter an even more self-satisfied cohort coming toward us. They were always in an indisputable majority. It was amazing! Like a movie! I felt the muscles of my Abkhazian friends flexing under their tight, freshly laundered T-shirts. By the way, I have seen Million Tomatoes lift a hundred kilograms with one hand, and every second man complained that his muscles took half his time.

And it
was
a movie. It advanced on us in “pig” formation, as the wedge was called in the Middle Ages. That is, in front rode a knight armored in fame, slight though he was in stature. The whole myth, the whole preeminence, the whole unquestionability of the cinema was concentrated in him. On either side, keeping a slight distance behind him, and taller toward the edges, followed his retinue—administrators and female assistants who seemed to be always asking something and taking notes. Mighty, courageous cameramen and electricians feathered this wedge.

My friends tensed, the movie director and I embraced, everything merged, and we were doubled. They had come to choose a location. The action of their film took place in Yalta, but Yalta did not fit Yalta. Sukhum fitted it better. This was a new version of “The Lady with the Lapdog.”
{39}
It was a musical. The role of the lapdog had been accepted by an actress who in her youth had been filmed by Bergman, though she wasn’t famous just for that, and the hint of a relationship between the heroine and the little dog, as you yourself understand, would produce a revolution in the Russian cinema.

In our new status as a recognized international cohort, we made the rounds of all the remaining coffeehouses on the embankment. There were about seven of them.

Oh, this embankment! It seems so long, by virtue of these coffeehouses! In actual fact this intensive segment lasts two hundred meters, at most, but to walk it you must spend half a day (and half a day back). You can also spend a lifetime (the same people of the embankment will celebrate your funeral). We were coming from the Amra, from south to north; they were going toward the Hotel Abkhazia (where the director was supposed to unpack), from north to south. But we were walking like normal people, while they had tromped past like elephants. Consequently we (as locals) made them turn back, to examine everything as it deserved. “That’s no way to choose a location,” we implied.

We gratified our vanity as best we could. All Sukhum exchanged bows with us, the filmmakers went unrecognized. “Who’s that?” the director would ask in one or another instance, when he thought our tone was especially respectful. “How to tell you
 
…
We don’t generally say, but everyone knows
 
…
Well, he’s a mobster.” This gentleman of sixty, in a snow-white shirt and a cloud of imported deodorant, his face as smooth as if shaved from inside, with his mild, intelligent features and a gaze filled with deference and virtue, was so unlikely as to be enchanting—you immediately had no doubt that just such a man, and only such a man, could be a mafia chief. He was very preoccupied, our capo; his granddaughter was trying to get into college in Moscow. All measures had been taken, and yet he was very anxious. The solicitous grandfather had notched up eight lives, however. No, he hadn’t killed anyone in the last twenty years. Simply because there had been no need. How to explain it to you, it’s rather complicated
 
…
Well, he has three or four shops, let’s say
 
…
He’s the owner?
 
…
No, the owners pay him. What for? Well, not to touch them. But it’s been twenty years since he touched anyone!
 
…
Well, so they pay on time.

The noble mafioso—ah, the leisure of his gait!—walked to his car, not in order to leave
 
…
No, I’m wrong! Of course he couldn’t have walked to the car himself, if he wasn’t leaving. He simply spoke, without turning to the man he spoke to. From behind his shoulder emerged Aslan (or was it Astamur? he nodded reluctantly, or perhaps unrecognizingly, in reply to my cheerful greeting). Aslan or Not-Aslan caught the keys, and it was he who walked to the car, opened the trunk, rustled around in it for a moment, and brought out something wrapped in
The Dawn of the East,
oblong, like a sawed-off rifle. This gun promptly fired, of course (in the hands of the unskilled dramaturge), as clearly and tonelessly as the first autumn frost. It was champagne on ice! Talent means talent in everything
 
…
Our friend the mafioso had been the first man in Sukhum to think of carrying a picnic cooler in his trunk! And now these dusty, talentless boxes, after overstocking the shelves of all the village general stores for several years, had become shortage items. (He hadn’t bought the cooler, by the way. He had received it as a gift from the manager of the cooperative that produced them.)

The champagne fired, striking my heart and
HIS
. Smoke curled from the barrel. The hand of a professional! How beautiful this was. I couldn’t deny myself the hyperbole
 
…
From the way he managed the bottle, it was obvious that his hand would not have trembled. Then this impeccable cleanness (not washedness), and the lovingly groomed fingernails
 
…
And the cuff! And the cuff link!
 
…
The cuff link was perhaps a bit large, though of course it was gold. But not everything at once—someday he, too, would wear a tiny cuff link, with a single pinprick diamond. It takes more than one generation to make the chief badge as inconspicuous as the Legion of Honor.

The glasses sprouted on the table (I hadn’t noticed any particular Not-Aslan bringing them), champagne flowed from the hand of the violinist who had never held a violin, the landscape vitrified as we watched: the sun, forever suspended over the mooring
 
…
the Greek fortress of Dioscurias, whose cyclopean rubble, although this is not the first thousand years it has lain here, always seems to have washed ashore only yesterday in some unprecedented gale
 
…
the trunk of a plane tree, diseased with psoriasis
 
…
the blinding path of sunlight on a sea becalmed at this hour, oily, taut as silk
 
…
the seagull forever suspended over the smokestack of the ship
Taras Shevchenko,
which is also moored forever
 
…
and the gull’s sharp cry will never fade over this landscape, which is suddenly darkening and turning coal black, narrowing in my eyes because overpopulated with happiness.

What I respect in him is that he never drinks champagne. “The main thing is, don’t drink the bubblies,” he was told by a dying old alcoholic, who meant not only champagne but beer and mineral water as well. H
E
believed the alcoholic, not me. Champagne is my privilege. Once a year I, too, can drink to success, which, by the way, consists only in the fact that yet another time has gone by.

My enchanting mafioso began to talk too much about the movies, addressing himself more and more to the director (the same breed!) and for some reason calling him Federico. By now our fame was running ahead of us like a large dog, like a smooth billow of lazy surf, and ultimately like us (in our own view). Champagne appeared at every coffeehouse. They loved us. The union of art and sport—that’s what a movie is, and you couldn’t find a better place for them to meet than an out-of-season resort. The beaches and restaurants and hotels stand empty just for them, for the film troupes and sports teams.

We were brought together by Marxen, the former world record holder in pistol shooting. Without ever having removed his telescopic sights from his eyes, he was now a cardiologist and a bachelor who in keeping with his specialty took advantage of all the local widows (those who hadn’t lost their charm and had even gained a certain quality of mystery), as the confidant of their autumnal secrets. So far, fortunately, our mutual friend was not treating us; so far we had among us one lone micro-infarct, Daur’s, which had flown as unexpected and bright as a hummingbird into our determinedly youthful company
 
…

Having made the rounds of all the coffeehouses, we must also stop in at the home of the physician and record holder. Here he would show us his library, this man who had read everything
 
…
Camus and Borges, if you had only known
 
…
who would be the first to read you in Russia! He took off his spectacles and exposed eyes so weak that even his hands, wiping his glasses, suddenly seemed as wax white and shaky as a flickering candle. Neither hand nor eye had wavered, however, when he hit 599 out of 600. The director, as always, was running the show; that is, he had started a penetrating conversation about sports. He himself couldn’t boast the same achievements in his past and was therefore trying to best the champion in his insight into the phenomenon. Not a chance!

Marxen was born blind and grew up blind in an Abkhazian village. His parents didn’t think to put glasses on him (minus twenty, he stated modestly). Children his age were already being taken on the hunt, but why take a blind boy? So one day when no one was home he put on his hundred-year-old grandmother’s glasses, seized a small-bore rifle, and darted outdoors, blinded by eyesight and looking for something to shoot. He couldn’t shoot the domestic animals, of course. Suddenly, fifty meters away, he saw some wild ducks swimming down the small river. He fired once—missed, the duck went on swimming. Fired at another—same thing. Fired at a third
 
…
Only on the fifth did he notice that they bobbed their heads after the shot. He checked his observation on the sixth and seventh. Same effect: they bowed their heads gently and shyly but continued to swim in the same column, steady as little boats. At this point a neighbor arrived, cursing as he ran—Marxen had shot all his decoys, it turned out, hitting each one in the eye, and they had continued to float downstream with the current.

“Dark, dark was the night, the rain was pouring down .. His father was Georgian and his mother Abkhazian, but his grandmother had been Jewish, a pre-Revolutionary revolutionary, and that was how he came by the name Marxen. His parents were imprisoned in ’37, so he ended up in the village with his Abkhazian grandfather. Even then, in ’37, he saw things clearly. Marx and Engels—he hated those mothers
 
…
You yourselves understand, what could he do with a name like that, the little blind son of parents subjected to repression? The only road was sports. He said that the brain, eye, hand, barrel, and target, when he fired, were not just a single line but a taut violin string singing in the wind, and then he took into account the wind direction, and the shimmer of warm air if the sun was
 
…
It was that hot in Italy, when he
 
…
Brain and target became a single point, equal to the bullet—he felt the movement of the bullet in the barrel when he fired
 
…

The director bit his lip. What the hell did he care about “The Lady with the Lapdog,” he was thinking, when
this
was the man he should be doing a film about! A ready-made scenario! The actor—there was no real actor
 
…
Oh, if only Cybulski were alive
 
…
Stung by the way the director had so quickly pulled the whole blanket (Marxen) over himself, I asked Marxen to show us his weapon. And now we heard all about the abject situation of the athlete in Soviet sports. He had nothing! He didn’t have his pistol—it had been state property, unlawfully classified as a military weapon. Only the stock—that was all he had left as a memento of his world record and twenty years of his life. Embarrassed by the paltriness of the outcome of an entire lifetime, he tenderly unfolded a flannel rag, as though it contained a baby’s little corpse. There lay a fantastic bone
 
…

It replicated the record holder’s hand from within; these reverse dents were unrecognizable, a form unencountered in nature; it was like death. It was, indeed, a death mask, or rather the mask’s primordial form, from which the face bereft of life is later cast. The mask of a hand (a mask is also made from the hand of a great pianist
 
…
 
). This death was warm, because it was wood. A rare wood, from a tree of rare hardness. Polished by the hand of a skilled craftsman, who had fashioned a one-of-a-kind stock for a unique hand. And then burnished by that unique hand, which had pulled the trigger hundreds of thousands of times. There was no trigger, no barrel. It was empty as a skull. I warmed it in my own hand—this was like a handshake. (Experiencing this sensation for the first time, I had no way of knowing that I would relive it within twenty-four hours
 
…
 
)

He had never killed anything but those little ducks. He hated hunting and fishing. But if there was anything he would have shot dead without hesitation, point-blank, it was that bloodsucker
 
…
As a marksman and a philosopher, he knew what murder was and hated murderers
 
…
Beria he would have hit from any distance. In the eye. That would even have been easier—the pince-nez would have glittered, he would have aimed at that patch of light. From two kilometers, two miles
 
…

“Miles?” The Englishman woke up. “You have Russian miles?”

“Don’t vorryr,”
Marxen reassured him. He had just begun to study English. His mix of Jewish, Georgian, and Abkhazian blood made him an internationalist, not merely a hater of executioners.

Carrying on with the choice of a location, we turned away from the sea at last, in the filmmakers’ van and the two cars (the mafioso’s and the monkey researcher’s), and began to climb upward along a river by the name of Water. Something reminded me of something. Wasn’t it here that Father and I had caught trout and grayling in the winter of ’54, when he was building his sanatorium in Sochi? He fished, and I wandered. This was his pedagogical measure—taking me along to the construction site—and my first exile. They were separating me from my first woman, who had been deemed “unsuitable” at a closed-door family council. I kept writing letters, running to the Claim Window in secret, and receiving no answer. I pacified my flesh with ceaseless bodybuilding, my biceps grew two and a half centimeters. My poor father! He, too, it turned out, was pacifying his flesh by fishing; who could have thought it
 
…
A man past fifty! (Fifty-two.) At the Claim Window I finally received a letter addressed to him, and read it
 
…
Papa, I couldn’t give it to you open! And when, embarrassed, straying among subordinate clauses, you nevertheless asked me straight out whether I hadn’t received by mistake a letter that wasn’t mine, I flatly denied it. A quarter-century later, when I was helping you take a bath and almost sobbing over your feeble absence-of-body with its expanding birthmarks, you kept your underpants on, explaining (what words you found!) that a son shall not see his father’s shame. What Bible had you read?! We never had one at home in
my
lifetime. We did, of course, have conversations about churls.