Authors: Andrei Bitov
That was what I was thinking, I who knew nothing about this, as I turned into the embankment detour in order to get across to the other bank, and became stuck in a traffic jam. I studied each oncoming face at length, because there were some people who for some reason had the same urgent need to get across to this bank. And it was always the same face, not only because the traffic jam was moving so unthinkably slowly, dragging along like a low storm cloud, its color blending with the asphalt, and not only because the other bank, which I could see across the river, was just as clogged as this one, but because each successive oncoming driver maintained so much the same expression that it was truly amazing—what had shaken them so, united them so?
…
Their same, shared face said, I don’t know who you are, staring at me right now, but you didn’t see me and I didn’t see you, and how I feel about what’s happening, am I for that bunch or this bunch, you’ll never find out and never tell
…
Only their knuckles were white on the steering wheel, as if gripping it harder than usual. Their sullen impassivity, their universal upper-echelon secretiveness
…
that was what frightened me. Not one expression of annoyance, indignation, fear, despair—they had all known all of this by heart for so long! It was they who were soldiers
…
all to a man. Halt! Breathe exhaust fumes! But not a single expression of exultation, either, I thought with glad melancholy. Not one!
When I had squeezed across the bridge at last and parked fairly near the cordon, I gently crept out to reconnoiter. Deserted and sunny. Neither cars nor people. Had they been chased away, or had they fled? The benevolence of the police put me on guard. I could see why there were no cars, but if there were no people, it turned out, it wasn’t because they weren’t being admitted. A few curious people, as wary as I, were pretending they had wandered over here with a non-political purpose. I felt neither terror nor gaiety. Nothing. A Bruegelesque idiot, in a winter cap with one earflap missing, was traversing this dismal canvas in a direction of his own choice, or at any rate crossing through it. He was carrying the heavy iron headboard of a bed, and I imagined I saw in his manner something surprisingly familiar, even kindred, even painfully so
…
Pavel Petrovich!
“How are you?” he said.
Meaning “how do you do,” nothing more.
We took hold of the headboard together and started to carry it. He in front, I behind. He seemed to know where he was going with it
…
For some reason it was very nice to see the back of his head, his thinning hair. A little old man in worn-out Adidas
…
“Say, where’d you disappear to?” he said to me.
“Who, me?!”
“You haven’t gotten any younger,” he said with satisfaction.
“Whereas you look splendid,” I parried.
“All the same, I’m frightfully glad to see you, Doctor Doctorovich
…
Well, what about it, finish the novel?”
Well, wasn’t he the scoundrel? As if it hadn’t been seven years. I almost dropped the bed.
“Say, did you bring any with you?”
He hadn’t even cared about my answer, it turned out
…
“Come on, don’t feel so bad
…
I brought it.”
This was said with such kindness, suddenly, that I realized he knew all. And he did, in fact, know all
…
“The fire at the Abkhazia started in the stovepipe in the kebab restaurant. They never cleaned it—they kept the fire inspector supplied with kebabs. Lamb fat and soot are a very good fuel mixture. ”
“How would you know?”
“I was there.”
Again I almost dropped the bed on my foot.
“You recently saw
City Lights
?” I guessed.
“What’s that, a Charlie Chaplin?”
“Where are we going?” My voice sounded ungracious.
“We’re eagerly awaited.”
“Are you sure?”
“You’ll see.”
We threw our burden on a pile of scrap metal. It was the barricade.
“It’s that easy?” I asked in delight.
“What did you think?”
And he glanced disdainfully at the tanks. We settled down cozily with a view of the tanks, as well as of the Moscow River and the Hotel Ukraine.
“Are you a democrat?” I asked.
“Who, me?” he said indignantly. “Of course. Who do you think I am?”
He built a fire out of boxes, then and there, and produced from the pocket of his oversized smock
…
What all didn’t he have there! Before I could think, he was extracting “it.”
He was extracting “it,” but I was looking at his hands. It was hard not to look at them. His characteristic fingernails, half typewriter keys, half claws, had curled down even farther, and his hands were covered with ghastly pink spots. Psoriasis, none other
…
“Vodka knows its job,” as he himself had once said.
“A burn,” he said, noticing my glance.
To tell the truth, I was dumbfounded.
“I was repairing an iron ..
And really, that burn couldn’t have been this fresh.
“Now
…
” he said vaguely. “Now,” he said, concentrating, and poured us each our first.
We had time for seconds, too, while the
chifir
{110}
was coming to a boil.
“Found it!” Affectionately he scratched under his shirt, where his heart was, with his terrible hand. “Found it
…
” And he glanced affectionately at the reality around us, as though it had changed into a small kitten. “You keep interrupting, I’ve never succeeded in fully expressing myself to you
…
The poor, poor thing! How it turns itself inside out with effort! For whose sake? And what can we offer it but never-ending, gasping work.
…
Four chambers. Always leading from one to another. Not a second’s sleep. And death in every pulse. Keeping count of death
…
keeping count of every second, a little more quickly than the moment passes. The heart—it’s faster than time! How short a distance left to run
…
It breaks the finish tape! A record! An ovation! And you’re gone. You didn’t run—you only thought you were running. Your heart ran! And your heart finished, not you. Why do you feel so sorry for yourself? Take pity on your heart, your heart!”
And he poured again, for himself alone.
“Wasn’t it you, Doctor, who used to quote to me from Thomas
…
‘Until the outer becomes
…
’ On your lips it all sounded strange. Like some sort of paradox: the outer becomes the inner, the man a woman, life death, and vice versa
…
Nothing strange about it! It’s merely a description of the heart
…
Merely! What a thing to say
…
How it struggles, your poor heart
…
Hear it struggling? It beats—and you hear. That’s the whole story. The music comes after. The rest is silence. A pause. The abyss. The cosmos. The heart doesn’t beat, it stops. Each second flies into the abyss, dies, faints there. And you also used to discourse on clocks!
…
The heart alone measures time in nature. Ever see the connecting rod on a locomotive? Think it turns the wheel? The usual technical sleight of hand! Because they have it hooked up to a feeble, shy little rod, in such a way that no one can notice that the connecting rod doesn’t move by itself. The little rod pulls it up, to make it move from the dead point—and the locomotive goes, fat and important, he puffs, pretends it’s him, thinks he’s the one. The heart
—this
is the main lock! It closes the whole chain: the universe with its holes, parsecs, and dwarfs, and the Earth of that Universe, and on it life, with its amoeba and man
…
and on man, this padlock! What is less artificial than the heart, with its ventricles, auricles, valves, and aortas? The whole of it was invented. By whom?! This is my blood, and this is my flesh
…
An eternal infarct! An eternally ruptured and healing membrane
…
The heart
—this
is virginity! Chastity! Because He blew Himself to bits for each one of us! Spare your heart, they say
…
but you can’t use God sparingly
…
simply pity it. It’s incorrigible, the heart!”
I was suddenly ashamed of my travels abroad, my dacha, my car, my potatoes, and I expressed too hastily my agreement and delight, noting, however, that the blood is enriched in the lungs
…
How indignant he was!
“Through the lungs, you say?
…
Through everything! What do you breathe? You assume you breathe air
…
But I say to you: Not in the lungs is the blood enriched, but in the heart. And with that enrichment it arrives here.” He rapped his forehead scornfully. “Our most public place, most polluted outhouse. Everyone’s noggin is like a thing. The head and the balls—these we have on the outside. But the heart is inside! It’s incarcerated in us as in a prison. That’s why we all have the same thoughts, and yet our hearts are lonely. Space vehicles, flying through the darkness of flesh
…
Our hearts are separated, but not our thoughts. A thought is a very superficial thing, and it never touches the essence. The brain doesn’t sing or dance, it doesn’t weep or rejoice, it’s a cold jellied mess. Why are we fixated on this bowl of mush? The
brain
is the very one who has never spared the heart, for he smugly imagines that the heart serves him. Everything, if you please, is subordinate to him—which means that everything also waits on him. And then, since everything waits on him, well, everything’s under his control. And then, since everything’s under his control, well, he can do everything. And since the brain can do everything, Come on, he says, let’s make an artificial heart! They built a ministry the size of the White House. Right Ventricle Department, Left Auricle Department. They hooked it up to a dying man: Go ahead, live! But I said: I don’t want to! The brain got angry at the man: Why not? we’ve provided you with everything, first-class supplies, what don’t you have enough of? missing your heart, you say?
…
They busied themselves with improvements, along the line of redistributing departmental functions and reducing staff. They made significant progress. The heart was quartered in a city block instead of a precinct. At this point a thoroughly wise man came and accused the doctors, not without justification, of stupidity. You’re archaics, he said. Why try to copy nature? You’ll never pull it off. Let’s proceed from purely technical parameters. To start with, they caught a calf. Installed a small electric motor in him
…
Do you know? He lived! The blood circulated normally. Supplied everything it was supposed to. And do you know what was missing? The stops! The blood brought supplies, but no notification of life and death. The calf had no pulse! His count of time was lost. He expired but didn’t die. For the heart’s every beat is
…
a battle! My God! What are you battling for?
…
Oh, Lord!” he exclaimed. “But how good it all is!”
“What’s good?” I said in astonishment, catching sight of the tanks again.
“The weather. The holiday. Despite all, it’s Transfiguration.”
“
‘The sixth of August, Old Style
…
’
{111}
And I had forgotten!”
“What, not patronizing the churches anymore?”
“I didn’t patronize the churches!” I said, hurt.
“I ran to church first thing today.”
“You?”
“I can get a hair-of-the-dog from the watchman. And what should I see but this bed.”
“You’re eternal! You’re a phoenix! Thank God
…
And of course you know what’s going to happen?”
“What’s going to happen? Not a frigging thing! There’ll be a thank God. A great holiday.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean them
…
”
“Which, those?” He didn’t even glance at the tanks. “Scrap metal. But don’t mind them. See there!”
With the spoon he was using to stir the
chifir
, he pointed skyward, not looking.
At first I imagined
…
But then I thought, No
…
I glanced down at the tanks once more, and then up at the sky. No, it couldn’t be! But
…
“And I saw in the air an army
…
”
{112}
Leaning on white-hot spears as if on shovels, wearing quilted jackets over their white wings, the angels dozed in the sky. Their Russianized, Düreresque faces were spacious as fields, creased by lightning, and smoothed by the unquestioned inevitability of martial labor. Their swollen, blacksmiths’ fists, forged along with their weapons, inspired trust, like their faces. My heart was eased, not troubled: it was they whose fingernails had grown through their hands, they who were shackled to the clouds with ascetics’ chains, they who had the heavenly trash of Russian villages stuck to their wings, like chicken droppings masquerading as a patina—log cabins, fences, cart tracks, wells, the ruins of churches and tractors
…
The sleep of the angels was leaden, and light as their wings. They startled and snorted like horses; their breath made our campfire flicker a little, a puff of smoke would reach up to them, and then it would seem that the angels smelled of the fire of their tireless battle. O God, how forbearing Thou art toward us, and harsh toward them!
“O Lord, help
them
!”
…
He thought or I said?
(February 28, 1993, Forgiveness Sunday)
On April 8, 1944, Hero of the Soviet Union Lieutenant Lapshin and his rifle platoon, in a sudden attack from two sides, took the bridge in the zoo, killing 30 Nazis and capturing 195. This decided the outcome of the battle for the zoo.