The Monkey Link (24 page)

“Don’t teach your father to fuck,” I heard. “This is it.”

We braked.

Back then I had seen this house
 
…
With a mansard, incidentally. Beyond the shrubbery, beyond the plane trees, beyond the lawn, it stands vacant, but as if the vacationers had only just moved out, just now. The house in which the little boy Lavrenty grew up. Right in this thick shrubbery, perhaps, the future Beria screwed his first kitten. She wouldn’t put out, she scratched him. And he killed her. Like the priest in the nonsense rhyme. But in the rhyme the priest killed his dog. So he killed him, too, killed the priest. Killed him because they’d eaten a piece of his meat. Even though it was the dog. But he hardly killed the priest for killing the dog. More likely for having her. Especially because he loved—

“He loved her—”

“How could that vampire love anyone!”

“I know the true story on that,” the director insisted. “I was personally acquainted with her. He saw her through his binoculars from his mansion on Moscow’s Garden Ring. She was walking home from school. She already had round calves, and he couldn’t take his eyes off them.”

“
 
‘Rather skinny, but her calves were round
 
…
 
’
 
”
{40}
Who had quoted this? Daur, of course. “
 
‘Lately she’s become a priestess
 
…
 
’
 
” He was spouting “Letters to a Roman Friend,” by heart. “
 
‘A priestess, and converses with the gods
 
…
 
’
 
”

“Who wrote that?” the director asked, startled.

“Sounds like Joseph,” the Englishman remarked.

“Well, he may have heard this story,” I replied, on the strength of my personal acquaintance with the poet. “He’s always been concerned with such things.”

“There’s a sea of scandal here
 
…
 
”

“A Black Sea?”

We were reclining on the lawn near Beria’s house and admiring the open view: on the left the mountains reached upward, on the right the valley broadened downward, implying the sea
 
…

The champagne, however, had run out, and the Englishman was limp with exhaustion.

“But when are the monkeys?” He was pushing to continue the journey.

“Tomorrow. Everything will be tomorrow,” the researcher explained to him. “Both the monkeys and tomorrow
 
…
 
”

Anyhow,
HE
had been right about the bubblies: champagne tires you out. The Englishman was sound asleep, but the others, too, kept dozing off. Except the mafioso and Daur, who were having a conversation behind me in Abkhazian. I listened: about those same “Abuzinians.” I listened: Abkhazian is the most mysterious language! It’s the swish of a dragon against a rock. From a time when dragons still existed
 
…
“I see a world blanketed with institutes of Abkhazian studies,” Mandelstam said. Sound is more ancient than speech. The sounds of Abkhazian speech seem to flow together, not into words, but into just one word, however long you like, equal to the length of the whole spoken sentence. As though landscape and action and character and time of action were not divided into subject, predicate, modifier, and object but were all contained in a single word, born anew each time. That is, reality isn’t stratified, it’s included in the word. The reason no one knows the Abkhazian language, not even the Abkhaz themselves, is that you have to inhale it along with reality from the day you are born. So natural was it for these men today to speak Abkhazian that I could immediately conclude they were both from the village, they had been born there and grown up there. It’s hard to believe the language is dying as long as even two people speak it the way Daur and the mafioso do. “Abuzinian” was not a word but a syllable in one or another long word—a word as long as they had breath for. This syllable that I had singled out kept shifting places in the word/sentence, standing now at the beginning, now at the end, now in the middle. The mafioso’s tone was resolute on the “Abuzinians,” while Daur was trying to mollify him. Or so I understood. By now I very much wanted to ask about these cutthroat Abuzinians. What did they want, and what hadn’t they shared? But everyone except me seemed to know this so well that I felt childishly afraid to ask, lest I lose my “in” status, so flattering and not granted to everyone.

“Is it already tomorrow?” The Englishman was awake.

“It’s still yesterday,” we answered wittily.

“Yesterday I still have a bottle of whiskey,” he replied.

Properly appreciating his sense of humor, we followed him to his hotel.

“No ice,” the Englishman said apologetically, fetching a threesided bottle with a turkey on it.

“He says there are no glasses,” Daur translated.

“Nyet problem,
” said the mafioso, not suspecting that he was translating from English.

Perhaps-Aslan was already bringing glasses.

We discussed, in passing, the subject of ethnic humor. Marxen, evidently wrestling with his own three nationalities, declared that there could be no national sense of humor.

“What’s Abkhazian, Georgian, Russian humor? Is it funny or not funny—that’s humor.”

“Funny to some, but not funny to others.”

“That is, funny to a Russian, let’s say, but not very to a German?”

“Or funny to a German, but not funny at all to a Russian—”

“Or funny to a Georgian, but not to an Abkhaz—”

“It won’t be funny at all to an Abkhaz if it’s funny to a Georgian.”

“Jewish humor strikes everyone funny—”

“If it’s really Jewish,” Marxen said.

“You mean the Russians invent those jokes themselves? That wouldn’t be so funny.”

“What do you have against the Russians?”

“Me? Never. Serozh, is there Armenian humor?”

Serozh considered for a long time and then took offense: “What are you, thinking of those Armenian Radio jokes again? That’s not Armenian humor.”

“All right, if the Armenians didn’t invent the Armenian jokes, or the Jews the Jewish jokes—or the Chukchi, certainly, the Chukchi jokes
{41}
—then who did?”

“Is English humor also not English?”

“I concur with the view that this is rather a question of import than export,” the Englishman said.

We burst out laughing, and the Englishman didn’t understand why.

“Something else strikes me funny,” he said, gesturing at what to our eye was his luxurious hotel room. “There’s so much wood in Russia
 
…
 
”

We followed his hand, as if he were showing us a grove.

The whole room really was paneled in wood, or rather, an imported plywood imitation of wood, more likely Finnish than Russian.

“And look, I can’t understand it
 
…
So much wood—and not one wardrobe. Nowhere to put clothes,” he added, reverting to English.

Our jackets were piled in the middle of his careless bed, on which we were also sitting.

“It’s perfectly understandable,” we said.

“Why??”

“They didn’t budget enough.”

“Of what, of what?” the Englishman said, with a perfect Voronezh accent.

“Well, economic resources. Money.”

“Enough for wood, but not for a wardrobe?”

He began to circle the room, thumping the walls. They responded with the sound of cannon fire. “Why so much?!”

“Funds.”

“Funds? You mean your Plan? That they sent you more plywood than money? But extra plywood
is
money, to you!”

We laughed again, and the Englishman couldn’t understand why. How could we explain that it wasn’t because of his failure to understand our economy? It was because “plywood,” in Russian slang, does indeed mean money.

“Plywood is cabbage,” someone tried to explain, but this was an infelicitous translation.

“Plywood is plywood
 
…
 
”

The translation had been made more precise, and, as if in proof of its supreme precision, all of a sudden the plywood exploded boomingly—fired a shot and fell silent.

“What’s that, what’s that!” The Englishman jumped up in fright, pointing at the ceiling. Something ran across it again, making a scrabbly racket. We were not about to explain to him that this was a rat, and perhaps also a cat. We said, “A mouse.” We weren’t about to shame the state.

“Then why such low ceilings?”

“They didn’t have enough plywood.”

“Meaning money?”

“No, meaning plywood.”

“Is this Russian humor?”

“No, economics. They made money on the plywood.”

“That is, plywood on the plywood?”

“You’re quick on the uptake. But you, unlike us, know what a third-category city is
 
…
 
”

“Ah, Voronezh!
 
…
 
” The Englishman rolled his eyes dreamily. We drank to Voronezh. You must agree, this brings our vast expanses together, when an Englishman drinks to Voronezh in Sukhum. It unites the empire.

“Let’s call it experience,” the Englishman said, in English. So this was the story. The Englishman had come to the Soviet Union to gather material for his diploma. (We never did clarify which was the diploma and which the dissertation: what we call a dissertation, they call a diploma—or vice versa.) He had come to study our experiment, because in Britain they had something similar. An experiment in keeping monkeys in uncongenial climatic zones under almost congenial natural conditions. In other words, free. He had heard a lot about the monkey colony in Sukhum and felt that this might be where he could garner some experience. But he was told that such an experience was common not only in Sukhum but also throughout the Union, and that monkey breeding was now a practice, not an experience (apparently, as the Englishman realized in Voronezh, they were confusing the concepts of “experience” and “experiment”). Apparently they also confused “practice” with “practicum” and thus sent him to a student practicum in Voronezh, where an experiment had once been set up, “reahlly,” with monkeys living under conditions approximating those in Voronezh, but the monkeys had died in a week, so that there may have been an experiment, but in practice there had been no experience, as he promptly reported to Moscow, with the request that he be transferred to Sukhum after all. He reported and reported, all the while living in a student dormitory (oh, you don’t know what this means in a third-category city!), until the period of his on-the-job training was up, and then he decided simply to test whether there was such a place as Sukhum, as on the map, and he reached it “on his own expenses”—that is, at his own expense, another project for which it was none too easy to obtain permission, so he had succeeded only through Intourist, as a private party, and now he had met Mr. Dragamashchenka (this, it turned out, was the researcher’s name—so we had a Ukrainian in our company, too), and lo and behold Sukhum “reahlly” existed, and Mr. Dragamashchenka had promised he would try to do everything possible
 
…
but this was the third day they’d been meeting, and he couldn’t pay for the hotel this long, it was supposed to be five stars but there was no wardrobe
 
…

Anti-Aslan said that five stars were coming right up, and before another rat had time to run across the ceiling he appeared with a bottle of cognac. The Englishman kept counting the stars on the bottle, half laughing and half crying.

“Sleep, sleep, sleep!” the Englishman proclaimed. “You’ve buggered me to death. Sleep is the shortest distance between two binges.”

The director and the mafioso were no longer there.

Mr. Dragamashchenka took my elbow and led me aside. “Would you be able to help me out?”

You can see, he said, what condition he’s in
 
…
(“No more. To sleep,” the Englishman was muttering.) On Fridays we have meetings with interesting people. Oh, a small group of research associates get together. A relaxed conversation
 
…
You can talk on anything you like
 
…
They know you well, he said with conviction, from which I inferred that he himself had never heard of me before. This did not wound me, however (or had I trained myself not to feel wounded?). After the meeting there would be a light tea, right there in the laboratory
 
…

Tea, of course, altered the matter. That was pretty good, tea out of retorts and test tubes. H
E
was pushing me to consent. You yourself see the condition he’s
 
…
it’s embarrassing. A foreigner, after all
 
…
But you won’t be embarrassed by a fellow countryman? In a fellow countryman we understand it, and besides, you’re doing fine
 
…

Doing fine
 
…
Friday
 
…
I had thought it was Thursday. I could be proud of myself. Wasn’t I every inch an “interesting person”? Today, at least, I was a very interesting person. Who here knew that
HE
(I thought of myself in the third person) had just finished something
great
! For me it was still Wednesday, when I had finally, after trying for a month, sat down at the typewriter
 
…
I had thought it was one night. It was two, as it turned out. Oh, this was a sign! This inspired hope. I still hadn’t read whatever I’d written there, but since I didn’t remember, it might actually be a text. I remembered that the last thing I had described was the yard—and I had walked out into it.

And walked out of it. Today I could be proud of
HIM
, too. No small matter, was it—two nights without sleep (I might have curled up for three hours or so, but in that same henhouse, without undressing, like a chick on a roost), forty pages of continuous text, approximately two half liters already, not counting the champagne that I myself had drunk
 
…
It’s not everyone who could, not everyone who would
 
…