Authors: Andrei Bitov
“What, what?” I hadn’t quite heard.
“Turn off the kettle and simmer down.”
In the ensuing silence Doctor D. could be heard sobbing. “I don’t want to talk about evolution! I don’t want to talk about mutation! I want to talk about diplodoci! They were jolly and kind, they rejoiced in life
…
loved to dance
…
”
“Sure. Blond, blue-eyed.”
Something flashed on the other bank, then flashed again. Impossible to make it out in the gathering dusk. They couldn’t have struck a spark?
“What did
YOU
just say??” I didn’t recognize my own voice.
“I simply said, didn’t you forget to turn off the kettle.”
“But didn’t
YOU
turn it off?”
“I did not.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Those were
eyes
glinting! The eyes of the leader on the other bank
…
But how brightly!
“I can’t believe you wouldn’t eat me,” I heard from the bushes.
“I wouldn’t eat
YOU
even on a desert island!” My voice rang with pride.
“Too squeamish?!”
The bushes were snapping, the leader’s eye was glinting, and the boiled-dry
jezve
on the windowsill was growing red-hot
…
I,
HE
, Pavel Petrovich, and Doctor D
…
.
“A ban on a particular meat, the imposition of a taboo on particular animals, is essentially that same membrane—the preprohibition against eating the meat of man
…
”
“The membrane from a beefsteak? Ha, ha
…
There’s no commandment ‘Thou shalt not eat.’ The commandment is ‘Thou shalt not kill
…
’ Why doesn’t the number of commandments match the number of deadly sins?”
“If it’s gluttony, if you go ape over meat—only then is it a deadly sin. You have to want terribly to eat a man!”
“A glutton is not a gourmet.”
“Man is like a tower. There’s a reason why he’s vertical, walks upright
…
An animal keeps its eyes on the ground
…
But our tower has holes. Mouth, nose, eyes, ears, and so on. Seven holes for the seven sins
…
The holes are armed with membranes
…
Commandments, prohibitions, taboos, chastity
…
If a membrane is ruptured, man is dehermeticized—temptation, sin, and evil enter freely through the hole. The devil leads the assault
…
Battering rams, ladders. Arson. The man flames up from within
…
A conflagration
…
The tower blazes
…
Sparks fly from the windows and embrasures, flame shoots out
…
Bruegel has these towers, Bosch has them. As many as you wish
…
”
“Does the number of holes match the number of sins?”
“If you count a pair as one, there are six. But there are seven sins.”
“The eyes don’t have holes.”
“As a child I was sure that the pupil was a tiny hole. I even tried to insert a needle in it, in front of the mirror.”
“Well? What happened?”
“I got scared. Everything’s backward in the mirror.”
“Man is imperfect because he’s supposed to perfect himself. On his own. With God’s help, of course. It’s not a sentence, to be a man. It’s a purpose.”
“You don’t mean to say that man is a profession?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“A profession, a purpose, a tower—next you’ll say a vessel of sin. Holes
…
The doctor is right. The worm invented our body.”
“I am slave, I am king, I am worm, I am God!”
“Two holes. In one, out the other.”
“Two men
…
The one was a publican, and the other a Pharisee
…
”
“You’re a Pharisee, Pavel Petrovich!”
“Who, me?! I have tasted of tribulation in public houses all over this land!”
“It makes no difference what hole pride enters by. You’ve got no reason to boast. Nowadays the Pharisee is much more of a publican than you. The Pharisee has become a publican, and the publican a Pharisee.”
“Two men went up into the temple
…
”
“And neither came out.”
“No, both came out. Two publicans went into the temple, and two Pharisees came out.”
“And what we got was Prometheus!”
“Not Prometheus, but Danko. Prometheus was before the Birth of Christ.”
“Oh, go sit on your progress! Fire, the wheel, the lever
…
Slavery—that’s man’s only invention.”
“Prometheus didn’t invent fire, he invented the home still. That’s why he had liver trouble. Cirrhosis is ‘eagle,’ in translation.”
“Translation from
…
?”
“The medical.”
“Is drunkenness gluttony?”
“A controversial question. ‘Eat, drink. This is my Body and my Blood
…
’ Who said that?”
“On first thought—”
“There’s never just one. Two holes—”
“There’s
only
one. How does that go? ‘Until the alive becomes the dead, and the dead the alive
…
’
”
“The outer the inner, and the inner the outer
…
”.
“The man a woman, and the woman a man
…
”
{105}
“And has this already happened?”
“Why, of course. All of it has. You just
think
you’re turning yourself inside out with effort. You’ll no more see the Kingdom of Heaven than your own ears!”
“Is the ear, at least, a hole?”
“You’re talking damned nonsense, but you yourself took meat from children, wine from old men, and fruit from monkeys!
…
And you ate your God.”
“Beg your pardon? Ate?”
“Literally. As a body. He descended, and you ate Him.”
“Will you finally shut up!”
“Ate Him! Ate Him!”
“Don’t blaspheme, you fool!”
“Pharisee! I hate—”
I lunged for
HIM
. He went crashing through the bushes like an animal fleeing pursuit. A large one, though
…
Suddenly, in silence and darkness, I was groping around on all fours as if I had lost my glasses. Suddenly, I heard
…
Sobbing, on all fours, rear end sticking up in unseemly fashion, face buried in the moldering leaves
…
“O Lord, if I am a formula, I curse Thee, that I may continue to believe in Thee.
“O Lord, if Thou art not, I curse Thee, that Thou mayest exist at least in my curse.
“O Lord, if Thou art, and I am not a formula, is this not too much for happiness?”
“That was when it all happened,” I recalled, my tires crunching along the highway. The desert stretched on. The sand flew coarser and coarser, struck the windshield more and more ringingly. And then, as I compared that silence and this one, that rustle of fallen leaves and this whisper of sand, that sense of expectation and this, and found them identical, I realized that I was waiting, and for what. In my unmilitary mind, the insight was blinding: I had never seen them free, the tanks, any more than I had seen the monkeys
…
I realized that the tanks had traveled down the highway ahead of me. They had ground up the asphalt and sent dust and sand rising to the sky.
Yes, that was when it all happened. H
E
was struggling to get to the other bank with a box of groceries, to feed the monkeys. Pavel Petrovich was teaching Doctor D. to puke, Valery Givivovich had his arm around Million Tomatoes
…
But I was seeing a flaming tower, with fire shooting from all its holes, and that tower was—the Hotel Abkhazia. Manuscripts burn splendidly, and the conflagration was starting from a manuscript! Especially with such a lot of plywood around it
…
On the way back, Pavel Petrovich babbled some more nonsense about a descended God: Since we had not fulfilled our purpose, and He had already given us freedom of choice, He was no longer able to interfere or correct, but neither did He divest Himself of responsibility. He sent us His Son and we didn’t understand, we assigned the heavens and the churches to Him and carried on as before. He had no choice but to share our lot, to descend to us and dissolve in us. In this sense, He is among us. And is even, perhaps, one of us. And we never know with whom we are dealing—every time we meet a man, not inconceivably we are meeting Him
…
But I understood that all was over. Not just the hotel had burned, and not just my manuscript, but
live souls.
The empire had ended, history had ended, life had ended—I didn’t care what happened next. Didn’t care in what sequence the debris and burning brands went flying, or at what velocity.
Somehow everything had become too clear about the future.
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter what happened now. Because what had been would never be again. When what has been vanishes, what would have been vanishes also, along with it, because not even an atom of what has been will be contained in what will be. You will not be. What’s the difference.
Both when I finally saw the first tank and when I saw the burning Abkhazia, both when I came up against that armored dune and when the heat of the fire stopped me, perhaps the sand got in my eyes, or the smoke, but I cared so little, pitied myself so little, that I started to cry.
“And you privately think you’re free of vainglory?” It was
HIS
sickening voice.
“Vainglory!” My blood boiled. “What’s that got to do with it!”
“You don’t regret your labor. When did you ever labor? You regret the lottery ticket—which might have been a winner, at last. Anything could suddenly happen
…
and suddenly didn’t. By the way, you abuse that little word ‘suddenly.’
”
Oh,
HE
knew how to get me! I blew up. “Who are you to say this to me! Purulent pederast!”
“Fie! In
tel
ligent, the man thinks he is. An intel
lec
tual.”
So much poison
HE
put into the one root
…
“Who, me—an intellectual?” I said indignantly, just like
HIM
.
“But
I’m
not,”
HE
parried regally.
I couldn’t argue with that.
“And then,” he said, resentfully and smugly. “Judge for yourself, how could I be gay?”
“Did I say it, or did you? In your opinion, if someone’s intellectual he’s homosexual?”
“What, aren’t they synonyms?”
“You know the word ‘synonym’?”
He burst out laughing. “Who can say what burned in the library at Alexandria? Were there many masterpieces? Maybe Bulgakov destroyed it so that he could speak his famous phrase?
{106}
Was Heraclitus all that good, apart from the quotations? Gogol
…
It’s definitely the masterpieces that burn. Easier for us that way. How inconvenient without a conflagration—we have to lose our manuscripts by the suitcaseful, like Hemingway
…
So let me tell you: that’s definitely your masterpiece burning now.
Live Souls!
Why
Soldiers of Empire
? I’d advise you to rename the book. Stick to this version. Even better, burn with it. A most happy finale! Right away you’ll be a genius. Myth is a splendid advertisement. People will start reading you, finding out what burned, your unrealized potential
…
Who can say that it wasn’t vast? You have to leave a trail of potentialities, not texts. It’s not enough to be better than others. Takes too long. Much easier to get what doesn’t belong to you, all at one go. Death—and right away your whole future, entire. And you don’t have to stick your neck in a noose, shoot yourself, burn your masterpieces, or lose your suitcases
…
That’s not your work or worry anymore
—they
will take care of the mourning and the money. They, too, have to exist somehow. They’ll
work
! For you, by the way. Just leave it to them. Give in. Walk away. Why keep on existing and existing? Make widows of them, go ahead, do it! Let them screw on your grave with the gravedigger—now, that’s recognition! Real recognition. Glory. And it has nothing to do with the tsar, or society—it was fate, the elements! A better co-author
…
No. Drunken nobodies get hit by a tractor, the great man never!
I dare you!”
I lunged toward the fire so that
HE
would stop me, and he did: “
‘Co-author,’ ‘tractor’—do they rhyme?”
“As you wish,” I said, slain. “Better, ‘provocateur.’ Is it true that none of them ever perished in an accident?”
“Unclaimed by fate. That’s why they dramatized it.”
“Just now my text is in flames—this is no dramatization.”
“What do you think, did the rats and cats manage to escape?”
“What the
…
”
“Because you’ll be the culprit in their death. Maybe one of them was a Copernicus.”
“Not Copernicus. Giordano Bruno.”
“What difference does it make? Even
people
bother you less than your manuscript. But don’t worry—nobody burned.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s no special trick. I observe life. There’s just one man who can still burn in this historic conflagration—”
“It just won’t be you.”
“Again, notice: I’m the boor, but you’re the one who always makes rude remarks. Always to me, moreover. You’d be scared of a boor.”
“I’m not scared of you!”
“Very clever. Even you can sometimes reply without fishing in your pocket.”