The Monkey Link (5 page)

“It’s Pushkin,” I said. “He’s never inaccurate. A genius.”

“I didn’t know. I don’t see any evidence of genius in it. The fact is obvious. Accuracy is no merit, inaccuracy is a sin.”

“But this is humor,” I said, surprised by the doctor’s narrowness.

“What does he want with humor?” the doctor said. “It amends inaccuracy, of course. But anything stated with final exactness has no need of humor.”

“But is there such a thing—final exactness?”

“In your field, I don’t know. But in science, yes.”

“Oh, really?!” I put as much irony as I could into this retort.

“Lorenz, now, the man we were just talking about,” the doctor parried. “Which is he, serious to the point of inexactness or funny to the point of exactness? Neither. Simply exact.”

I concurred and found a gambit: “Yes, he’s exact. But then, what to do about man? You evaded giving an exact answer. Can man be exact in defining someone else’s existence, if he’s inexact in conceptualizing his own?”

I was pleased. Right on the doctor’s heels, one more step, and I stood on the summit of the dune.

I had managed to catch him with my question on the way up—a good thing, for I would have forgotten it here. To say that a view opened up is, again, to say nothing: I dropped my sandals on the sand, to free my hand for a gesture that I did not make. I looked now at one sea, now at the other, but I could also see them both at once. On this windy day (as I discovered it to be, at the summit) the western sea was sapphire, with very white, cloudlike whitecaps, apparently motionless. It was so blue that it completely robbed the sky above of color, as if draining it. So that when I looked at the western sea I felt slightly topsy-turvy, as if standing on my head and looking at sky underfoot. I looked at the eastern sea: exactly the reverse. The sky was soaking up the sea’s color. Faint, feathery whitecaps still remained, but the decolorized water, very quiet, kidskin-calm, was losing its surface and resembled a celestial haze. The western sea was real: salty and bottomless. Floating beyond the horizon was prosperous Sweden, three hundred miles away. The eastern sea was a shallow, almost fresh inlet, with the Lithuanian shore only thirty kilometers away. But neither Lithuania nor Sweden was visible from here. The two seas were equal and boundless, deep and salty-looking.

“True, I didn’t reply to your atomic bomb. That’s what you had in mind, isn’t it, when you thought of man as being so extremely powerfully armed?”

East and west, sky and sea were still spinning in my head, and I didn’t have my feet on the ground. I really didn’t, in actual fact, but I realized this only later. I nodded.

“You see, a weapon of mass destruction can’t be considered an armament in the sense we spoke of
 
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If we draw biological parallels, as you so tactlessly push me to do, we may discover some analogy with the weapon of mass destruction in the mechanisms that regulate the population of a species. This is a far more complicated field than the one we’ve touched on
 
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But in general, certain phenomena which until recently have seemed mysterious receive their explanation
 
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how shall I put it?
 
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The genetic code contains
 
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This will be hard for you. Briefly, certain things have been provided for in nature
 
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But the bomb—after all, that’s a purely human phenomenon, and without your forcing me I wouldn’t begin to draw such an analogy
 
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”

I didn’t understand it all, for I was deafened by the vision I had gained here, but with a reporter’s assiduousness I did not retreat. “Well, all right. Let’s give up on that. But is man a biological creature?”

“In three indisputable manifestations: like an animal, he multiplies, eats, and dies.”

Oh, that phrase impressed me!

Death is somehow inherently characteristic of this place, though in every respect it’s a true paradise. I have already mentioned the extraordinary mix of soul and body peculiar to it. I don’t know whether there are many such points on our globe—I had never seen one before, and I have seen no other since. And whenever I’ve returned here (returned, not come
 
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), I have discovered it, in the same persistent meaning. I promised to explain this peculiar feeling of geographical non-existence, and have twice postponed it—I couldn’t explain it to myself.

I have said that everything here is the way it was in our first textbook, that here at last we resolve the almost unnoticed, childish disillusionment of disparity. What we are taught does not match what is real. This is the very point of our education, forming the first little crevice of experience, deep in the subconscious. The flow of life will erode it to the size of a ravine, itself perhaps more like the textbook ravine than a ravine in nature. Oh, that ill-printed illustration, where color crept onto color, obliterating and redoubling the line! That apocalyptic ravine had been stripped bare—it looked like a dead tree, a streak of lightning, the brain! Our youthful romantic images smashed like waves against the concrete shore of reality. When we visited an extraneous second cousin once removed in a famous port city, we saw neither ships nor sea; on the zero meridian we will discover neither a line nor a zero; we truly do not see the forest for the trees.

Everything here in this preserve had been preserved, geography included. Sea, bay, dunes, shores, forest, grass, sky, and birds—not only were they present here, in very close proximity, but they also matched the secret images that we associate with the words when we pronounce them to ourselves with our eyes closed: “bay,” “forest,” “birds”
 
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A reification of concepts, a realization of the dictionary.

Space seemed smaller here by one dimension. At the expense of the one, the other two were fully exposed. Tighter here by one, but roomier by two
 
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Since the theory of relativity is hard to explain through any example accessible to us in experience, mathematicians suggest that we imagine a comic character who exists in two-dimensional space. To tell the truth, he’s no easier to visualize than the theory itself. Here on the Spit, however, I could exist almost like that more-than-flat man—in profile alone. I have to say that the poor fellow’s existence, though he has been cheated of a dimension, can only be envied.

I could, for example, naked as Adam, walk out of my cabin to the western shore and start north along the sea, at the edge of the tide, without meeting a single person. And walk thus for an hour, two hours, three—the whole day, all night, always meeting no one, always going the same way, north, as if along a compass needle. I walked until I tired of it, for an hour, let’s say, or two, north along the western shoulder of the highway
 
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and when I did tire of it I turned around: crossed the highway and trudged back, this time down the eastern shore, this time strictly south, but again along the edge of the water, again along the highway, again keeping boundless water on my left and the highway on my right
 
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The Spit ran south to north (along a steady straight line, on the map or from the sky) for a hundred kilometers, yet where I lived it was no more than a kilometer wide. So I, too, on this geographical knife blade, strolled only north or south, balancing between west and east.

From my early school years I remember those poignant zoo-geographical maps, covered with profiles of wild animals, according to their areas of distribution. Since these were visual teaching aids, the animals were the main thing you had to be able to recognize on the map, and this led to an utterly catastrophic violation of scale. Belgium and Holland together would be covered by a bunny, with a scrap of Denmark fitted between his ears. A ram with fabulous doughnuts for horns would stand with his front feet on one side of the Hindu Kush and his hind feet on the other. Not to mention the elephant (the proportions of the animals were more strictly observed on such a map), who easily covered any of the newly developing countries. Without meaning to, the map greatly exaggerated the place of wild animals in the modern world, thus overriding for a long time, in a child’s consciousness, any anxiety about their fate. Well, on the Spit, even that map was remembered as not being much of an exaggeration. Not to mention jackrabbits, because I already have, but each time I took a walk I had every chance of encountering a roebuck, and if I was lucky, a fox or even a boar. When such an animal openly crossed the road within a few feet of me, running along a parallel that intersected this naturally demarcated meridian, and he wasn’t in scale but what they call “actual size” on this narrowest of all lands I had seen—then the scale changed, the animal truly did almost cover the Spit from sea to sea. I recalled the map every time, and smiled indulgently at my loss.

That is also why the birds fly so eagerly over the Spit, dipping their wings to both seas. They fly above the exposed meridian and temporarily switch off all the locators that help them map their flawless route with such precision across forests and mountains: north in spring, south in fall. The birds relax on autopilot over the Spit. All clear, just keep on flying. The birds spend the night on the Spit, gather their remnants of energy for the remainder of the journey
 
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All in all, the Spit is the largest port on the world’s air-ocean, unequaled in its bird traffic. Here the bird researchers have built their nest. Here, too, a diffuse human consciousness has spread its snares and traps.

No matter how man has rigged himself out technologically, there are some basic items he has been unable to reinvent. The latest model of car rolls on wheels like a wagon, food is prepared in a pot over a fire, and the freshest fish, even from the newest seiner, are caught in nets. Birds, too—the fish of the air-ocean—are caught in bottom nets, just like fish, the deep-water birds. In the air-ocean the law of Archimedes grows weak, and universal gravity grows strong. Here a cork just barely pops up—a cork from a champagne bottle, at that—and fishing floats sink, rather than soaring up as they do in water. These nets look strange to an outsider, rising as they do from young forest against a background of sand dunes. From a distance, with the light gleaming through it, this fallen, truncated, four-sided pyramid may look airy and azure, harmonizing with the classical topography of the Spit in its own way. Up close, when you see the massive logs used as stretchers, and the rusty cables used as bracing wires, which have a hard time raising the weightless-looking nets to a height of nearly fifteen meters, you begin to realize, with a modicum of justified relief, how difficult it still is for man to carry out simple construction decisions with his own hands, how awkward and primitive man himself still is. And although the researchers don’t net these birds for their daily food, but rather band their legs with a weightless little ring, record them, and release them to the ocean, there is a kind of justice in this still-primitive hunt, an equality of rights, perhaps, between bird and ornithologist, a modicum of morality in this seining. (Here I can readily imagine the shrug of their shoulders: they would gladly get a more modern rig—given the chance.)

In summer, only foolish little strays drift into the nets. The traps are turned around when spring is over, their mouths facing north in anticipation of the fall migration, the seiner’s fall voyage. After the initial Martian weirdness, your eye grows completely accustomed to the traps. They even add something for you, when you mount the dune and survey the whole surrealistic landscape of sand, sky, and sea—an empty net is quite fitting here, spread out in these barrens as if a flood tide had recently been and gone
 
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The eye grows accustomed, and so do the birds who live here. They are perched along the crosspieces and bracing wires—audacious crows!—on the brink of a threatening perdition. But no less audacity, with an equally blank stare, can also be seen in people crossing a street, for example. A man won’t walk into the path of a car any more than a crow will fly into a net.

The local residents, too, mainly fishermen and the families of fishermen, are accustomed to these nets. Except that they find it comical and wasteful for a net to serve other than its intended purpose. So ridiculous, this pastime of idle scientists, who nonetheless get paid (though admittedly not very much) for doing nothing, while the fishermen slave on the seiners, taxing their bulging muscles
 
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But a considerable mental feat was required of me, too, in order to surmount this step when I tripped on it, and to discover that my sneer wasn’t essentially much better than the local one.

There are numerous ill-starred areas of the human mind in which we all have the illusion that we are specialists in some degree. The illusory accessibility of our pursuits is a target for the ignoramus: he hits it.

And really. After the traps, the next facility to arrest the tourist’s attention was a certain shack known as the “Markovnik” (in honor of Mark, who had built it). Chinks of daylight showed through it: round boxes were mysteriously arranged on its roof; indoors there were clicking instruments, which looked extremely complex; the multitude of different-colored wires, forever in a tangle, was awe-inspiring. And here I note privately that the standard of complexity for my entire life has been, and still is, the sewing machine, which I was forbidden to turn
 
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Those mysterious round boxes on the roof, for example, proved to be merely cages, open to the sky, each with just one bird in it, hopping along radial perches. A system of wires connected these perches to electrical measuring devices, which clicked every time the bird hopped to the next perch. Mark wanted to know which of the perches the bird hopped to most willingly and often, and at what time of year: the northern perches? the southern?
 
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He was studying the guidance of migratory birds.

That’s all? But what a wonderful installation!