The Monkey Link (18 page)

“Got away, the snake!” he said.

The fact that Pavel Petrovich had escaped gave me mixed feelings. On first thought, of course, I was glad for him. On second thought, it greatly surprised me that he was capable of such a thing. On third
 
…
Adam, Cain, Abel, I thought, and grinned, not without bitterness.

“Look,” said my officer, holding the key out to his colleague.

“Hm-m. yes,” drawled the other. “Where’d he get it?”

“He’s not saying,” mine reported, “and he’s got no passport.”

“Of course not,” said the other. “No residence stamp.”

I almost flew into a rage, but my officer backed me up: “He says he lives in Apothecary Lane.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near the three stations,” I said.

“Oh, you all live near the three stations.” They both started to laugh. “What about your friend, he live there too?”

“He’s no friend of mine.”

“What, never saw him before?”

“No.”

“How come you had your arm around him?”

“He was going the same way.”

“To the three stations?”

“Why, no, as far as the highway. I was lost, and he said he’d show me.”

The other officer nodded encouragingly to mine. “No simpleton, is he?”

“Doing fine! mine agreed.

“Lost, if you please. And where were you lost, if you even know?”

Now, that was the question! There he had me. That I didn’t know at all—where I was.

“Tell us where you’re coming from, at least,” mine prompted, as if he were really on my side.

“From the monastery.”

“From the monastery?! What were you doing there?”

“Taking communion.”

“That does it,” said the other. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

…
 
You don’t have to believe me, but in the end they let me off. I hadn’t expected it of them. Still less had I expected it of myself.

I woke up sitting on an ordinary office chair, in quarters strangely unlike a prison cell. It was the kind of pen in which people keep small animals, like rabbits or, at the extreme, foxes. Through the wire partition that separated me from the duty room, I saw a peaceable policeman dozing at his post. Quartered alongside me, on a chair like mine, was a man I would never have expected here: a solid citizen. He wore an expensive-looking coat, with what I took to be a beaver collar; an astrakhan hat, which set off a very noble gray crew cut; delicate gold spectacles, which glittered fiercely
 
…
and he was asleep with his massive, very well-shaved chin resting on the (ivory!) knob of his equally massive cane.

“Awake?” I heard the policeman’s kind voice. “Come on out.”

He unlocked the grilled door to our cell.

“Come on out, don’t worry, we have nothing against you.” (Never in my life had anyone spoken to me so kindly!) “The major just got here, we’re going to let you go
 
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Stay put! This doesn’t concern you!” he shouted menacingly at my dignified neighbor, who had made some move to follow me. “You’ll stay here with me!” The word “me” sounded thin and mosquitolike.

A model and example, I fluttered out of the cell like a little bird, with a censorious glance at my colleague, now already my ex-colleague. I had sobered up, of course, which surprises even me. True, I reeked! The major—clean-shaven, exemplary, with an athletic glow on his trim cheekbones and a university emblem in his buttonhole—squeamishly asked me not to come near and to talk from a distance. I managed to explain the whole thing to him
 
…
What I like about the movies is that I can tell the police I work in them. Then, of course, come questions I can answer—that is, questions turning into a conversation, into a chat. Not that the major had seen even one of the films made from my screenplays. But I did have, if not my passport, at least my union ID. And it corroborated my address, as well as my name. And I hadn’t been fighting or singing or shouting obscenities, I hadn’t put up any resistance. At the monastery, as it happened, I had been visiting some artist friends. And artists, of course—well, you understand
 
…
And this smell I had, it was just a misfortune—my digestion, sort of, or my liver. Drink a kopeck, stink a ruble.

“But why don’t you look after your health, if that’s the case?” the major said in parting.

“I can’t say I’ve abused it very often,” I lamented with blue-eyed innocence.

“But why didn’t they see you off?”

“They were drunk as skunks,” I said censoriously. “I didn’t have anywhere near as much to drink as they did.”

I had found the key, as it happened, in a village (a separate conversation about the village—where? what district? it turned out they were practically fellow countrymen). All rusty. The boys had restored it for me, I was going to hang it on my wall.

“Here, leave the key with us. But the Galsworthy that you promised you’d try and get (my wife’s really keen on him)—when you do get hold of it, drop in and see us, and I’ll return it to you.”

He actually tore out a used calendar page and wrote down his telephone number.

I had perked up so much that I even inquired what my bigwig cellmate had done.

“Don’t ask!” The major scornfully waved me off.

It was already morning, and not even very early. The sun was warm. The sky was blue. Lord! What happiness this was! To walk out of a detention cell, walk out unscathed, walk out to the air, to freedom—and besides have fine weather! I even felt young and fresh, as though I hadn’t gone beyond a liter yesterday but was peacefully returning from a morning swim or tennis game. To think in the direction of yesterday—never mind remember it—was loathsome and terrifying. The part of me that was alive, the only reason I still thought I wasn’t finished, was my self-righteousness. After all, how had I managed to persuade them? Why, only by believing the whole story myself. I walked out of there fully aware that justice triumphs, and specifically—this is especially characteristic—in my case. The man with the cane was cogent corroboration of this.

Hardly had the police station disappeared from view, hardly had I inhaled a chestful of air at last, convinced that yesterday’s fantastic horror simply hadn’t happened, that it was all an inflamed delirium, which I had fortunately overcome, conquered, and forgotten—when there was a determined tug at my sleeve. There stood Pavel Petrovich, drawn, sleepless, chilled to the bone.

“Don’t tell me they let you go?” he said in a whisper, glancing around. “I was sure you’d get fifteen days.”

“How’d you find out I was here?” I said, nonplused.

“Where else could they take you?”

“You’ve been waiting for me the whole time?”

“I wouldn’t have waited past eleven. The judge gets here by eleven.”

“What time is it now?”

“Exactly time for the store to open. Let’s go!”

Thus was I punished, and again from on high, for the self-righteousness that had so transfigured me just now! Already we were walking out of the store with two bottles, this time Kavkaz port, I think. Moreover, it was his treat again—that was the surprising thing. For he still had my fives, intact, and he hadn’t bought the vodka from Simyon at all, Simyon had owed it to him
 
…
Now, squinting at the daylight world, and sensing the glances at our dead-white skin and sudden stubble, and clasping to our bellies the petards of Kavkaz as though throwing ourselves under a tank with them, or rather, under the cars and trucks, we stood in the middle of the street and gasped for breath, we would never get across this torrent, and I, for one, really didn’t know where to go next, and by now I no longer wanted to go where we were “eagerly awaited,” and besides, Pavel Petrovich seemed dispirited after his night
 
…
No park, no plantings—a hellish neighborhood. New construction that was no longer new, a fifties development. Elephantine buildings with sealed, fortresslike entrances and special old ladies who in that quarter-century had grown up on the benches at the entrances. Even Pavel Petrovich, everywhere the insider, finally seemed at a loss. But you don’t know Pavel Petrovich! Nor did I, at the time, know all there was to know about him
 
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Our goal was literally a few feet away. He was squinting at those few feet not because he was lost but because he was about to make a dash. Across from the liquor store they were making repairs, or rather, remodeling the first floor into something, most probably another liquor store. The showering star of the welding torch was our landmark
 
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A laborer had donned his visor and was welding some kind of structure in a looming black doorway. Pavel Petrovich headed for him confidently. I spinelessly followed, already under his spell again. He approached the welder and said not a word to him—although this time it surely wasn’t Simyon but a man he didn’t know at all, any more than I did—said not a word to him, just: “Let us by.” The welder immediately entered into our situation, with absolutely no mother oaths. He extinguished his torch, raised his visor to reveal his good, working-class face, and readily moved aside, clearing the way for us. He, too, said not a word, just: “But step to the back
 
…
 
” I instantaneously completed the sentence in my mind: “
 
…
 
so that nobody sees you.” But I was wrong again, because the sentence had a different ending: “
 
…
 
so that I don’t blind you.” “Step to the back so that I don’t blind you”—the phrase gave me no less happiness than the morning that had met me outside the police station! We walked in. And he truly didn’t watch us go, he said nothing further to us in parting but went on with his interrupted work.

At the back of the empty dark hall, the probable future store, stood some sawhorses. On these, Pavel Petrovich—and again very cozily!—laid out our property. The worker (I don’t want to call that noble man a laborer) sparkled in the doorway, the only light for the entire premises, and we silently drank our first glass and silently waited for the quite rapidly arriving renewal of our constitutions, and I began to feel good, good again, good all over again, and it seemed to me that the worker was defending us, shooting back at a world that was bad and hostile to us.

“If you want, I’ll tell you quite honestly,” Pavel Petrovich said, and gave me a look so sad that I didn’t understand it.

But I felt so indulgent toward him, in view of the nobility of our worker, our protector, our machine gunner
 
…
that I no longer seemed to remember (though in fact I did remember) his nocturnal treachery, I felt indulgent and didn’t want to hear his excuses, his humiliating lies, and I said, admiring my worker, “Why didn’t you offer any to him? Well?”

“He won’t have any,” Pavel Petrovich answered lucidly.

“Why not?”

“Because he will at lunch break.”

“You know him?”

“How could I? I’ve never seen him before. So, do you want me to tell you?”

“Well?” I asked crossly. I still hadn’t recovered from my heroic behavior at the police station.

“In all honesty, I turned chicken. That’s why I abandoned you. Now you won’t want me to be your godfather.”

No, I didn’t know this man yet! He was utterly unable to accept the idea that he had betrayed me. No, he hadn’t betrayed me. He’d had no choice, it seemed. Owing to a number of circumstances, which he would someday tell me about, he had no right to take the risk. On the other hand, I must understand that I was with him for life and should rely on him as on myself. But if I knew the whole story, if I had any idea what he’d had to suffer in his lifetime
 
…

What was this power he had seized, if only over me alone?

…
 
Unlikely that I was alone
 
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I had traipsed along after him again like Gogol’s Mizhuev.
{27}

What I never succeeded in grasping, and what indisputably got me into trouble, was this: the interval and the dose. That is, I couldn’t grasp the law or rhythm by which he varied it: now half a glass, now a full one, now one-third full, sometimes after five minutes, sometimes after an hour. I couldn’t swear to the accuracy of the interval, of course, because I scarcely had any sense of time left. But in his implacable, suicidal drunkenness there was some element of power over himself and over the process, and although it was a total mystery how I maintained my equality with him, every time he found it necessary to add or repeat I proved quite able and sometimes even willing to endure it. Both his tale and its stormy whitecaps of ideas, presaging the assault of yet another world system, were somehow subordinated and organized by the seeming systemlessness of his toasts. For he did keep his hand on that arrhythmic pulse! This was hard to believe, and all the harder to formalize as a thought, but he seemed to be drinking through me, not himself, and it wasn’t that I was submitting to his desire to keep on, but rather that he was being guided at first by my capabilities, and later also by my potentialities. The dreadful stories of his sympathetic, horrific life were fitted in between these spatially and temporally unequal drinks
 
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The fascists set fire to his house; sheep bleated; the flag fluttered over the village soviet; the tractor crushed a drunk in a rut; one night a boar appeared in the headlights of the Studebaker; not until a week later were they found, starving in a cellar and unable to remember the word “mama”; his brother escaped from the juvenile colony but proved to be the “cow”—his fellow escapees ate him fifty kilometers from Ulan-Ude; they found a child’s finger in a meat pie at the station lunch counter; his father raped his little sister in a furrow
 
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This was a TV soap opera, with all roles played by him. But I did not doubt. Occasionally my feeble mind attempted to calculate the hero’s age and was confounded, just as in my attempts to calculate the quantity he had drunk. My companion and contemporary had lived several lives, sometimes reaching age seventy and age seven simultaneously. The events he had participated in, or sometimes merely witnessed, were historical, but then his role and perspective would become fantastic, and, in a complete reversal, the persuasiveness and concreteness of the facts of his personal life would paint the historical fact in the most phantasmagoric colors. But each of these biographical motifs always had the same underlying thought: betrayal. Every time, he was unjustly, illegally, accidentally, intentionally, through no will of his own, et cetera, banished, seized, resettled, imprisoned, punished, humiliated, trampled—at the university, in the army, in the orchestra, in the work brigade, in kindergarten, in the Academy of the Arts—his highroad, his bright path, his calling, his purpose was blocked and cut short. Every time, he was
betrayed.
And however unreproachful I was as his listener, however poorly I understood, I could not be fully unaware of the link between this endless chain of treacheries and the fact that he had taken to his heels last night and I had been arrested. My sympathy for his misadventures and my belief in the truth of the events was inconvenient for him, because the more he talked, the harder he tried to justify himself. And the more I agreed with him, the tighter he drew his own noose. This was not intentional on my part, and the fact that I was rising in his estimation and towering ever higher must have exasperated him.