The Monkey Link (6 page)

This is what I, who am wholeheartedly on their side and have been graciously admitted to their habitat—this is what I catch myself thinking
 
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The last time I came, I was lodged in an attic over the “staff room,” where laboratory work was done. For an attic, this was luxurious—actually, the second floor of the largest building at the observation post. It was piled with old nets and various research rubbish. I wandered around the attic, happening upon strange items—say, a bundle of glass eyes in various sizes, from owl to sparrow, for stuffed birds
 
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I enjoyed it here. I paced up and down the long attic, past the nets, in a tense creative silence. If I grew bored with meditative pacing, I could walk out on a peculiar little bridge, the landing of an outside staircase, and gaze from on high, with a captain’s squint, at the view that lay open to me. I saw dunes and forest and sky, and the trap with resting birds perched on its wires. I could gaze thus for a moment, as if in deep reflection, and return with a sigh to my manuscript, which hadn’t made one line of progress. As it turned out, I accomplished a great deal of work in that attic, half a novel. I discovered this with surprise when I got home, and my attic existence took on the color of special happiness and success. This time, too, I was relying on the attic again, for I had exhausted all other methods. Therefore, when the attic proved occupied I felt it cruelly, as a blow to my last creative resources. The sole cause of my silence lurked in that attic.

The attic now had a far greater population than when I lived there. It was banked with cages of young birds, who had been raised in such a way that the starry sky was the one thing they would never see in their lives. Research Associate N. was studying the role of the starry sky in their overall guidance system
 
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Every morning I sourly watched her haul the cages down from the attic so that during the day the young birds would be in the air and sunlight, conditions more natural than her experiment. And every evening, when it began to grow dark, I watched her haul them back indoors under the attic sky, in exchange for the starry one. The staircase was narrow and steep, with wobbly railings
 
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the cages were bulky and awkward, so that she couldn’t see where she was going
 
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my glance, as it followed poor N., was not friendly.

“Don’t you think,” I said, catching her yet again at this clumsy pursuit, “that you’ve been studying the effect of carrying the birds upstairs every day, rather than that of the starry sky?”

Receiving no reply, I trudged off to my cabin.

This cabin had graciously been made available to me by a staff member who was away on vacation. It had been built “for himself,” with great respect for his own taste. The builder’s personality was imprinted on everything I touched here: the mark of the craftsman. Skill in the practical arts was especially characteristic of the inhabitants of the research station. The very presence of skill, in our day and age, had always been important evidence to me. I recognized that it was not in vain. It meant that their main work, although invisible to the philistine and never understood by me, also contained this trait, since it was so dramatically revealed along the periphery
 
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The construction materials had been found on the seashore. The walls were papered with maps—geographical, historical (the Children’s Crusade, the Ottoman Empire), and nautical—on which, every once in a while, I discovered with surprise the very cabin in which I was staying. Everything folded back, jackknifed, the little table, the little chair, the bed, occupying no space, extremely convenient to use
 
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I made up games with the owner’s personal belongings and found no use for my own. Such a cozy space, my thoughts parasitized on it.

And I walked out, away from the cabin—to drift around the premises doing nothing, stretch my legs on the narrow paths with the staff members, who drifted around doing their jobs. Once I noticed Associate N. carrying a small, flat box for trapped birds, and followed her into the “staff room” to see what she had caught.

It was not a migration season, the catch was haphazard. She had only three little birds. The business of measuring and recording had been repeated a thousand times; I always liked these practiced motions, which could develop no further except into virtuosity. A bird in the hand, in everyday life, is a more than rare phenomenon. Here, the hand seemed to have been invented just for the purpose. How conveniently, how precisely the empty hollow of our hand conforms to a bird’s little body, duplicating it! How rapidly and efficiently all this was done: the aluminum band was pressed around the tiny leg, the journal entry made, the wing measured
 
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Now N. blew on the back of the bird’s head to part the feathers and determine its age, then tossed it upside down into a narrow, diaphanous bag, the pan of special scales. The bird weighed its eighteen grams. Next, with a luxuriant gesture, she flourished the bag from the open window
 
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The little bird easily slipped out, dipped swiftly three times in unexpected freedom, and flew away from us forever.

I poked my finger (stiff and clumsy, compared to a bird) through the net. The last remaining bird glared at me with its angry little bead, then painlessly but courageously pecked my monstrosity of a finger.

I wanted to ask Associate N. whether the shock of banding would affect the bird’s later life (how would you like it if they did it to you!)—and this time restrained myself. I did not ask.

“What a nice little bird,” I said lyrically, removing my finger from the net.

“Little bird!” N. said scornfully. “How many years have you been coming here? You might at least learn the name of one bird. At least this one! After all, the station is named for it!”

“What is the station called?” I asked.

“Go outside and read it.”

I went outside. On the building was carefully written:
Fringilla.

Fringilla
—that’s just a finch. I have long known the word “finch,” I never recognize the bird finch. I’m always much more a member of my own generation than I suppose. I don’t know; what nuances of history or progress or the age can excuse these mental blind spots? Bird, tree, bush, weed
 
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it’s just never reached the point of personal acquaintance. How cheated I always feel in the forest! Look, a bird fluttering up from a branch
 
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What kind of branch? What kind of bird? “Animals have no name. Who ordered them named?”
{6}
How I value this poet, who has found an excuse for me. Actually, my ignorance does not inhibit me from a mute and prayerful delight in nature, if I happen to notice her
 
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But—what poverty and destitution!

Birds? Crow, magpie, sparrow
 
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Maybe the chickadee
 
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Flowers? Rose, daisy, snowdrop
 
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Butterflies? Cabbage butterfly
 
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(Goodbye, Nabokov!)

At this point my twelve-year-old daughter enters, and in keeping with this text I continue the quiz. “Tell me, but don’t stop to think, just list them: what trees do you know?”

My daughter, in some surprise, but obediently: “Spruce, pine, birch
 
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” Pause. “Maple, oak
 
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Maybe the chestnut?”

My daughter is honest, she doesn’t go on to name the ones she doesn’t know: elm, beech, ash. Those are words, not trees.

Next: “Weeds?
 
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Dandelion, plantain, burdock
 
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” The rest are just weeds.

“June bug, dung beetle
 
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”

“Shrubs
 
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Mountain ash, lilac
 
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”

How quickly the series slams shut! She knows no more than I do. She knows just as much as I do. Her generation will not correct the errors of mine. It will assimilate them.

“I forgot the ladybug—that’s another beetle
 
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I know the birds better!” she said cheerfully, and then rattled off my ignorance, word for word, like a prayer: “Sparrow, crow
 
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I know some sort of chickadee, and a little parrot
 
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I haven’t seen a bullfinch, but I do know the bullfinch
 
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”

Silence.

“I know the woodpecker
 
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The goose. I don’t know the duck. Oh, the chicken. A chicken’s not a bird.”

“Don’t you know the stork?”

“Pictures don’t count.”

“The seagull?”

Silence.

“Fish?”

She brightened. “I don’t know any fish at all,” she said. “Not a one. Is a swan a bird?
 
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You know who I know!” she said. I brightened. “The flamingo!”

It’s the time, of course. The swell of data, the flow of communication
 
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Perhaps we keep our heads this empty so that someday we can stuff them with valuable, practical information? Otherwise we couldn’t fit it in? I don’t believe this. I remember too many makes of cars and televisions, more than the weeds and trees. Ignorance is ignorance. In the Space Age, a few individuals have been in space, even if they don’t know the names of living things. But I haven’t! It’s I who don’t know, not everyone
 
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So this, for me, will forever remain irreducibly strange: it is
natural
for us not to know these things. I couldn’t like a man who learned the names of mice and grass blades by rote, out of snobbery, in defiance of everyone. He would be as insanely precious as a madman, unnatural in his very naturalism.
Artificial.
Not to know, in the age of science, is as natural as breathing. This astonishes me. There is always someone who knows something that not everyone knows. Surely, not everyone can fail to know the same thing?

An existence in just two dimensions—only lengthwise and (an existence not very accessible to us) only upward—emphasizes the relationship between the top and the bottom, brings us close to the ideal of a homogeneous habitat. Within every skeptic, behind the mask of disbelief, there is a sighing romantic. “White the lonely sail
 
.
 
.
 
.” Romanticism is bound up with the idea of existence in a homogeneous habitat, an existence inaccessible to us by nature. Poets gaze enviously after sailors and aviators who have realized a dream. There, at last, an idea is realized in pure, undisappointing form—“as though the storm brought rest.”
{7}
But no, not fully realized
 
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They get there, but they don’t belong. Only in their vessel and only as a group and not forever: the corruption of return, the soul disillusioned by falsehood. “Give me nothing more! Just a boat and an oar! A boat and an oar
 
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”
{8}

The only homogeneous habitat accessible to man is the realm of the spirit. The supreme thought is accessible to each of us, various people at different points in time and on earth can think it, all paths lead to it, but once achieved, it will be one and the same thought. Only at the very summit will we possess the definitively common nature that cancels loneliness, the common nature with which we are born
 
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If someone has reached Truth and someone else is about to reach it, it will be the same Truth, their paths will cross. We are definitively equal only at the very bottom (dust) and at the very top. The rest is journeying. Pilgrims, when they grow weary, look at the sea and the sky—the horizon recedes, and the sky is always as high as ever.

Thus I interpreted to myself the unfathomable idea of the supreme—thus I daydreamed on this most estranged of earthly surfaces, where the threads of all four dimensions had grown thin, almost invisible. Two of them had worn through. Should the last two wear through, this earthly cloud would fly away, it seemed.

But the Spit’s narrowness, which essentially eliminated one dimension, could not, even together with the timelessness of sand, water, sky, and solitude, have created this effect, the homogeneity of habitat that I nearly experienced here. And all the other explanations I found for myself were partial—did not explain
 
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For example: this was the westernmost point of the empire, no longer Russia, more likely Germany, what used to be East Prussia
 
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But I had been farther west. There the earth became Poland and was Poland, but it was nothing more; that is, this unheard-of condition of the earth (neither Russia nor Lithuania nor Germany nor Prussia nor Poland) also didn’t extend into the West. Or another explanation, more basic than the state: the regime. This territory was under a dual prohibition, that of the preserve and that of the frontier. Here was an unpoetic but realistic reason for its solitude, untrampled landscape, wild animals. But again—not for its incorporeality. I also found a more unexpected reason for this land so organic and harmonious: it was not so created by God, it turns out to have been so created by man. Here the notorious noosphere seemed most justifiable and noble. Man, on his own initiative, had planted forests on the Spit and loosed wild animals. Not even a century had passed since the origin of the Spit I was now admiring. This was hard to believe, so natural to the Spit was its current appearance. Feebly extrapolating, I tried to picture what it had been like without man—that is, without pines, birches, and blackberry bushes, without moose, roebuck, and boar: the inhuman wind furiously prowling the dunes, rolling them from place to place, blowing them eastward, straggly inhuman willow branches quivering in the wind, birds inhumanly flying over
 
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There would be enough here for a ballad, a piercing ballad howling like the wind—but only one. The poet would wrap himself in his cloak, squint into the distance, and grit the sand in his teeth, whispering the great line, as expressive as the naked Spit—and then drive away in the same carriage, rolling up the blind and fastening it shut without a backward glance. The immortal poem had already seen all, with its own sighted lines
 
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No, I hadn’t seen the Spit that way, and I didn’t mourn it. Grounds for pondering whether one is always right to mourn the departed. Not all waters have flowed away before our very eyes
 
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